UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


GIFT  OF  CAPT.  AND  MRS. 
PAUL  MCBRIDE  PERIGORD 


UNIVERSITY  of 
AT 

LOS  ANGELES 
LIBRARY 


Sbafcow  Cbrist 


{Ebe  Sbabow  Christ 


AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  CHRIST  HIMSELF 


(Beralo  Stanley  %ee 

AUTHOR  OF  "ABOUT  AN  OLD  NEW  ENGLAND  CHURCH" 


flew 
Century  Co. 

1800 

<\  :i  O  ,1 

U  ^  j  '1 


Copyright,  1896, 
By  THE  CENTURY  Co. 


THE  DEVINNE  PREM. 


Contents 

PACK 

I  THE  PAGAN  EMPHASIS     ....  i 

II  THE  EMPHASIS  OF  LIFE  ....  8 

III  THE  EMPHASIS  OF  THE  IDEAL  .  12 

IV  THE  HAGAR  NATION 19 

V  THOU  SHALT  NOT 22 

VI  THOU  SHALT  NOT 28 

VII  THOU  SHALT  NOT 32 

VIII  THUS  SAITH  THE  LORD   ....  36 

IX  MILK  AND  HONEY 45 

X  I  AM  THAT  I  AM 53 

XI   THY    GENTLENESS    HAS    MADE 

ME  GREAT 63 

XII   DEEP  CALLETH  UNTO  DEEP  .    .  72 

XIII  WHO  GIVETH  SONGS  IN  THE  NIGHT  77 

XIV  WHEN    THE    PEOPLE    SAW    THE 

MOUNTAIN     SMOKING    THEY 

STOOD  AFAR  OFF   ....  83 


CONTENTS 

XV  "WHERE  WAST  THOU  WHEN  I 
LAID  THE  FOUNDATIONS  OF 
THE  EARTH?" 89 

XVI   CURSE  GOD  AND  DIE 97 

XVII  DOTH  NOT  WISDOM  CRY  AND 
UNDERSTANDING  PUT  FORTH 
HER  VOICE? 106 

XVIII  VANITY!  VANITY!  ALL  Is  VANITY  114 

XIX  THE  SHADOW  CHRIST 118 

XX  THE  SHADOW  CHRIST 123 

XXI  THE  SHADOW  CHRIST  .....  128 

XXII  THE  SHADOW  CHRIST 134 

XXIII  THE  SHADOW  CHRIST 146 


A  book  is  the  shouting  of  a  man's  heart 
from  the  housetops. 

The  public  is  a  cruel  confidant.  Either 
it  hurts  him  who  dares  by  not  hearing  what 
is  most  precious  to  him,  for  the  rumbling 
of  the  drays  —  which  is  oblivion;  or  it 
hurts  him  when  the  drivers  of  the  drays 
shout  back  —  which  is  fame  —  the  world's 
rushing  compliment  of  misunderstanding  a 
man  instead  of  ignoring  him. 

Yet  who  would  not  dare? 

No  man  shall  lose  his  soul  in  risking  it 
with  its  Larger  Self. 

Out  into  the  listening  darkness,  where 
the  shadow  audience  waits — baffling  in  its 
very  welcome — this  little  book  goes  forth. 
By  far-off  lamps  it  seeks  you,  by  windows 
never  seen  ;  past  a  mist  of  faces  that  an- 
swer not  —  and  as,  one  by  one,  for  their 
little  life  with  the  earth-light  and  your  soul, 
you  open  these  leaves  of  mine,  each  brings  its 
greeting  from  a  world  I  love —  its  hope  and 

vli 


fear  of  you — before  you  fold  it  back  into 
the  darkened  place t  where  it  shall  wait  and 
watch  for  the  coming  of  men. 

A  clumsy  thing — a  little  pasteboard  and 
gilding  and  type  —  a  book  —  with  the  hum 
of  the  paper-mill  lingering  in  it  and  the 
touch  of  unknowing  hands.  With  the  col- 
ors of  desire  and  the  symbols  of  experience — 
to  give  one's  soul  to  paper — to  have  it 
flashed  forth  in  bare  black  and  white,  and 
thrown,  like  the  news  of  the  night,  in  the 
dooryards  of  the  world.  Paper  is  but  paper 
to  the  world,  and  a  book  —  a  book. 

But  the  Great  Spirit — who  to  and  fro 
between  our  solitudes  goes  guarding  the 
children  of  thought  —  shall  read  with  you 
these  broken  memories  of  days  He  has 
walked  with  me  ;  and  Life  —  the  gentle  old 
interpreter — shall  bring  the  meanings 
home,  at  last. 

In  the  brotherhood  of  play  and  worship 
and  the  humor  and  awe  of  truth  shall  we 
be  wayfarers  together.  This  is  not  an  ar- 
gument, but  the  breath  of  a  land  that  is 
loved,  not  gaining  its  way  by  a  logical  use 

Till 


of  terms  —  nay,  losing  it,  perhaps,  in  low 
•music  without  words  —  a  spirit —  a  passing 
light — like  a  halo  on  the  hills — with  no 
authority  but  its  shining — perhaps  —  with 
no  importance  but  its  being  loved,  with  no 
ambition  except  to  be  forgotten  when  Truth 
is  more  beautiful  than  now.  Too  reverent 
of  the  Unknown  God  and  too  proud  of  the 
spirit  of  man  to  settle  anything — a  book 
with  but  one  hope  which  can  come  to  pass — 
that  in  being  read  it  may  read  you  ;  and 
with  one  truth  that  can  always  stand — that 
of  being  true  to  itself. 


ix 


ZTbe  Sbafcow  Gbrist 


"A  man  shall  be  as  the  shadow  of  a  great 
rock  in  a  weary  land" 


Sbabow  Christ 

* 
i 

Ube  Tpa^an  ]£mpba8i8 


LOOKING  at  the  world  with  the  cosmic 
vision  that  has  come  to  us,  there  is  a 
tendency  to  limit  the  moral  genius  of  the 
Hebrew  to  a  somewhat  smaller  place  than 
it  really  occupies  in  the  supreme  civiliza- 
tion of  the  earth.  The  faint  gleams  of 
our  own  truth  on  the  eastern  horizon 
of  thought  have  come  to  us,  and  it  is  not 
unnatural  to  mistake  the  afterglows  of  the 
waning  visions  of  India  for  a  beautiful 
gray  pagan  dawn  that  will  soon  suffuse 
the  world  and  enlighten  the  Christ.  When 
a  strange  religion  floats  to  us  across  the 
seas,  like  the  chant  of  countless  peoples 
from  the  mysterious  land  of  legend,  with 


2  Cbc  SbaDow  Cbrist 

all  the  charm  and  theological  romance  that 
dream  by  the  sunrise,  the  tendency  on  the 
part  of  the  rarest  men — the  world-listeners 
—  is  to  listen  to  other  revelations  overmuch, 
to  come  to  conclusions  that  should  only 
be  reached  by  the  study  of  the  civilizations 
they  have  produced. 

The  man  with  an  international,  inter- 
eon  insight — who  has  the  temperament  of 
a  Japanese  mirror,  who  sees  through  to 
China  when  he  looks  at  the  reflection  of 
American  life,  or  Buddha  when  he  studies 
the  Beatitudes ;  whose  spiritual  life,  blend- 
ing Christ  and  Confucius,  the  Koran  and 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  is  a  world- 
anthology,  with  touches  of  truth  from  the 
Veda  and  the  Old  Testament,  from  Rous- 
seau, Thomas  a  Kempis,  Walt  Whitman, 
Plato,  Athanasius  and  Mrs.  Besant  —  is 
prone  to  be  grotesque  with  what  would 
otherwise  be  a  very  beautiful  conception. 
Being  a  whole  world  by  himself,  a  sum- 
total  sui  generis,  he  does  not  quite  know 
how  to  master  it,  and  fails  signally  in  the 
very  sense  of  proportion  which  he  has  col- 


Gbe  pagan  Emphasis 


lected  himself  from  everywhere  to  illustrate 
—  to  a  provincial  Christendom.  His  bal- 
ance fails  generally  in  the  direction  of  his 
favorite  ignorance.  It  would  not  be  called 
ignorance.  It  would  be  called  new  know- 
ledge; but,  from  the  Tree  in  the  Garden 
until  now,  new  knowledge  has  been  but  the 
showy  side  of  what  men  did  not  know. 

It  is  well  to  listen  to  Omar  Khayyam 
singing  like  an  JEolian  harp  in  the  desert, 
with  the  winds  that  blow  down  from  the 
stars,  but  the  Astronomer  Poet  was  not 
Persia.  The  Christian  religion  is  not  its 
deeds.  The  pagan  religion  is  not  its  songs. 
Our  souls  are  filled  with  the  dreamy  voice 
of  Mozoomdar,  and  thoughts,  like  incense, 
swing  to  and  fro  out  of  the  reverie-land 
of  the  East;  but  Mozoomdar  is  not  India. 
As  long  as  we  judge  pagan  religions  by 
their  ideals  and  Christianity  by  its  per- 
formances, the  place  we  give  to  the  legacy 
of  the  Hebrew  race  will  be  far  beneath  its 
importance. 

The  emphasis  of  the  half- unveiled — the 
beautiful  endeavor  of  the  spirit  to  atone,  to 


Gbe  SbaDow  Gbrtst 


eke  out  its  ignorance  with  kindness  —  ever 
overreaches  itself.  The  fairer  comparison 
of  civilizations  and  revelations  is  not  gained 
by  looking  down  from  the  words  of  Christ 
to  their  fruits  in  the  government  of  the 
western  world,  but  by  looking  up  from  the 
fruits  of  the  East  to  the  fruits  of  the  West, 
and  from  the  words  of  Confucius  to  the 
words  of  Christ.  Until  that  far-off  day 
when  words  and  deeds  are  synonyms  this 
is  the  first  principle  of  comparison.  Each 
must  be  compared  with  its  own  kind. 

The  only  way  for  the  western  idealist  to 
vitally  appreciate  the  Hebrew  who  made 
him  possible  is  to  be  transmigrated  from 
the  Browning  Club  into  a  sleepy  little 
heathen  Hindoo,  toddling  around  a  bun- 
galow, wondering  what  everything  is  about, 
until,  brought  up  to  dream  in  the  India 
schools,  through  the  religion  and  the  life 
of  his  people  he  moves  out  at  last  to  the 
thought  of  the  world  and  discovers  Chris- 
tianity. 

In  comparing  the  Hebrew  and  other 
contributions  to  humanity,  a  man  born  in 


Cbe  pagan  jSmpbasts 


a  Christian  country  is  at  a  singular  philo- 
sophical disadvantage.  He  has  to  think 
his  way  backward  to  the  pagan  religions, — 
almost  as  confusing  and  untrue  as  render- 
ing "Parsifal"  backward,  note  by  note,  or 
culminating  the  great  drama  of  Bayreuth 
with  the  dark  wonder  of  the  Kundry  motif, 
instead  of  the  Saviour  strains  of  the  Grail, 
and  the  echoing  Glaubenstema.  Mozoom- 
dar  follows  the  logical  order  of  revela- 
tion. As  his  heart  widens  out  he  thinks 
his  way — not  backward,  but  forward,  over 
dead  nations  and  sleeping  gods,  to  the 
climax  of  human  faith.  His  spiritual  ex- 
perience is  arranged  by  sheer  circumstance, 
according  to  the  dramatic  unities.  In  ex- 
pressing philosophically  the  Christian  point 
of  view  he  has  but  to  think  his  life.  Canon 
Farrar,  in  trying  to  realize  the  pagan  point 
of  view,  would  have  to  unthink  his  life — 
if  a  word  may  be  coined,  the  very  awk- 
wardness of  which  reveals  its  meaning. 
Our  knowledge  constitutes  our  ignorance 
of  the  ethnic  religions.  The  perspectives 
are  disturbed  and  the  shadows  are  in  the 


6  Cbc  SbaOow  Cbrtst 

wrong  places,  but  a  pagan  approaches 
Christianity  the  way  the  world  did.  Every 
man  born  into  the  natural  heathenism  of 
being  a  boy  follows  spiritually  the  logical 
order  of  revelation  in  his  own  life;  but  Chun- 
der  Sen,  when  his  soul  peers  over  the  ut- 
most of  his  native  worship  and  gazes  for 
the  first  time  upon  the  vision  of  Judea,  fol- 
lows the  old  heartache  of  the  world,  and 
onward  —  like  a  miniature  human  race 
moving  through  his  soul  —  through  the 
faiths  of  centuries  and  beautiful  dead  ideals 
he  passes  to  his  God.  It  is  a  cosmic  expe- 
rience. The  heartbeat  of  all  the  nations 
shall  be  in  the  love  of  such  a  man  for  One 
who,  like  Day  and  Night,  shines  and  shad- 
ows over  all  lands  and  peoples  until  they 
know  Him. 

His  Christianity  alone  can  have  the  world- 
depth,  to  whom  has  come  the  wandering 
through  the  world  to  reach  it.  He  thinks 
centuries,  and  wonders  religions  that  we  can 
only  guess.  We  can  never  conceive  the 
climax  of  the  Hebrew  revelation.  We  have 
not  experienced  it  as  a  climax.  We  can 


Cbe  pagan  Empbaste 


state  it  —  we  can  write  down  symbols, 
guessed  from  our  unthinking — but  we  can- 
not unwind  the  years  that  are  gone,  and  we, 
can  hear  but  faintly  in  the  far-off  place  of  I 
books  the  footsteps  of  our  fathers  coming 
to  our  faith.  With  the  wistfulness  of  the 
Messiah  has  come  to  our  Christianity  the 
emphasis  from  above,  and  that  which  ap- 
peals to  the  converted  Hindoo  as  a  climax 
is  to  us  an  uncompleted  prophecy  still  seek- 
ing for  its  higher  self,  in  the  day  when  our 
revelation  shall  be  our  civilization,  and  not 
the  token  of  it,  and  belief  shall  be  life. 
But  with  his  actual  biography  of  convic- 
tion the  converted  Hindoo  enters  into  a 
religion  which  is  a  cosmic  symphony,  rilled 
with  the  struggles  and  dreams  of  belief, 
retrospective,  dark,  and  splendid  with  mem- 
ory, and  glad  with  the  Final  Word  —  he 
comes  with  the  ethnic  emphasis — the  em- 
phasis from  below. 


II 
Ube  jEmpbasfs  ot  %ife 

BY  taking  the  centuries  one  by  one  into 
its  confidence  a  great  book  lives.  One 
year  at  a  time  it  earns  its  greatness.  It  is 
immortal,  because  it  never  lets  a  moment 
go.  The  world  shall  be  filled  with  no 
passion  or  question  or  despair  it  will  not 
share.  It  knocks  at  every  door.  It  beats 
down  every  barrier.  With  the  flush  of  its 
mighty  youth  it  gathers  its  thousand  years. 
It  throws  itself  upon  life,  the  substance  of 
which  immortality  is  made. 

A  Bible  lives  because  it  strives — adapt- 
ing, resisting,  impelling.  It  lives  by  being 
lived.  Renewed  with  each  new  childhood 
of  the  earth,  forever  in  the  heyday  of  its 
strength  —  men  call  it  old  because  it  has 
been  young  so  long. 


Cbe  Bmpbasis  of  life 


The  assertion  that  he  who  knows  the 
Scriptures  will  possess  all  knowledge,  made 
with  the  deftly  concealed  autobiographical 
feeling  of  the  man  who  is  obliged  to  make 
it,  is  founded  upon  an  underestimate  of  a 
book  the  very  first  principle  of  which  is 
that  it  is  so  intimate  with  life  that  it  can- 
not be  interpreted  by  itself  and  requires  all 
knowledge  to  show  how  true  it  is.  It  finds 
its  authority  in  seeking  out  the  answer  of  the 
human  race.  From  the  beginning  to  the 
end  it  seems  to  search — "  Is  not  this  true?" 
A  divinely  unfinished  book,  faith  does  not 
consist  in  repeating  it.  Faith  is  our  life 
with  it.  It  does  not  live  for  us.  It  does 
not  see  for  us  or  see  to  stop  our  seeing. 
It  was  not  inspired  to  stop  inspiration.  It 
will  receive  before  it  gives. 

The  disciples  did  not  follow  the  Master 
because  they  believed  in  Him.  They  be- 
lieved in  Him  because  He  made  them  be- 
lieve in  their  own  lives.  The  faith  of  the 
Son  of  God  was  His  faith  in  the  sons  of 
men.  Crying  His  faith  upon  the  very  cross, 
it  is  His  divinity  that  he  brought  out  the 


io  abe  Sbafcow  Cbrist 


divinity  of  those  who  crucified  Him,  that 
he  had  the  divine  daring  to  give  them  di- 
vine work  to  do  and  divine  things  to  see, 
and  showed  them  that  they  could  see  and 
do  them.  It  is  His  divinity  that  He  strives 
with  men,  not  through  a  book,  but  through 
a  life  that  completes  the  book  —  through 
that  greater  soul,  wrapped  like  a  larger 
self  around  every  man,  which  is  the  diviner 
half  of  the  Bible;  which,  whether  it  be 
called  the  Christian  Consciousness,  or  the 
world,  or  life,  is  at  once  the  approach  and 
the  issue  of  the  truth  —  the  eternal,  tire- 
less, patient  emphasis  of  God. 

But  while  the  pervading  human  life  is 
the  pathway  the  Father  of  the  prophets 
has  placed  before  His  book,  no  one  who 
has  not  a  private  door  shall  enter  there. 
The  youth  who  reads  looks  forward  to  his 
own  soul,  and  to  him  who  sees  his  life  be- 
hind him,  the  story  of  Israel  is  the  clumsy, 
halting,  mimic  Bible  he  has  been  himself. 
Egypt  is  his  metaphor.  The  wilderness 
his  figure  of  speech.  The  Leviticus  period 
that  comes  to  all  development,  the  Elijah 


Cbc  Bmpbadts  of  Xtfe 


attitude,  the  David  time  of  war  and  song, 
the  period  of  Proverbs,  of  captivity  —  he 
has  lived  but  these.  The  Isaiah  spirit  seek- 
ing him  at  last  and  opening  the  vision  of 
faith,  the  Bible  is  God's  account  of  him. 
Strange,  and  sad,  and  beautiful,  and  help- 
less, and  perverse,  he  comes  to  his  New 
Testament  as  the  Hebrews  came  to  theirs. 
He  but  reads  the  Bible  with  his  own. 

The  omnipresence  of  the  Great  Book  is 
but  the  omnipresence  of  life.  It  makes 
every  century  the  comrade  of  ours,  and 
every  man  its  parable.  The  contempo- 
raneous is  history  flattened  out.  All  time 
covers  every  moment  like  the  sea.  The 
world  is  the  huge  mimicry  of  a  single  man. 
The  great  abstractions  that  govern  nations 
are  but  the  inventories  of  old  histories. 
Theology  is  biography.  Men  are  the 
creed  of  God. 

An  empty  Bible,  in  an  empty  universe, 
in  an  empty  life, —  to  him  who  dares  to 
read  a  Bible  by  itself. 


Ill 
Ube  Bmpbasts  of  tbe  flfceal 

BUT  between  the  Hebrew  unfolding  his 
thousand-year  vision  and  the  insight  of 
our  modern  life  has  arisen,  under  the  guise 
of  freedom  of  thought,  a  slavery  to  the 
matter-of-fact,  a  scientific  petulance  which 
has  strangely  disturbed  the  real  spiritual 
values  of  the  Old  Testament. 

Forgetting  in  the  first  importance  of  a 
fact  (its  being  true)  its  second  importance 
(its  being  kept  where  it  belongs),  the  huge 
Moment  in  which  we  live  is  prone  to  be- 
wilder the  truth  with  statistics — to  forget 
the  epic  outlines,  the  sweep,  the  mighty 
movement  of  that  vast  conception,  when, 
thousands  of  years  ago,  down  the  footpath 
of  the  Hebrew  soul  there  came  a  God  to 
struggle  with  the  nations  of  the  earth. 


Gbe  Emphasis  of  tbe  1  Deal          13 


He  may  not  have  come.  He  may  not 
have  thought  of  coming.  Though  it  be 
from  the  beginning  to  the  end,  the  romance 
of  a  national  imagination,  the  sacred  ghost- 
story  of  the  world,  it  has  become  the  most 
literal,  the  most  material  reality  in  the  his- 
tory of  men.  With  every  fact  and  every 
theory  brought  forth  against  it,  stripped  to 
the  nakedness  of  a  dream,  the  very  dreaming 
of  it  is  the  most  consummate  achievement, 
the  most  dynamic  event  in  human  destiny. 

If  the  sea  is  a  lie,  to  have  thought  of 
such  a  sea  involves  the  greatness  of  the 
sea  itself.  If  Isaiah  was  impracticable — if, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  Jehovah  did  not  at- 
tempt to  put  so  much  in  one  man, —  it  is 
enough  to  know,  so  far  as  essential  truth  is 
concerned,  that  He  could  if  He  would.  In 
the  mean  time,  combining  gifts  that  only  the 
divine  heats  of  a  hero's  heart  or  the  move- 
ment of  great  events  could  have  blended 
together,  Isaiah  stands  as  an  abstract  of 
what  a  great  man  will  be  like  when  he 
comes  —  a  shadowing  forth  of  the  ideal 
toward  which  we  strive. 


14  Cbc  Shadow  Cbrisi 


The  actual  is  not  the  truth.  It  is  the 
part  of  the  truth  that  has  been  attained. 
The  ideal  is  the  truth  —  the  whole  truth. 
The  criticism  that  makes  a  prophet  im- 
possible only  makes  the  dream  of  such  a 
prophet  more  wonderful  —  a  prophecy  in 
itself.  Facts  did  not  create  an  ideal. 
Facts  cannot  destroy  it.  Facts  destroy 
but  facts.  If  a  man  is  apparently  de- 
stroyed by  being  proved  a  dream,  the 
dream  will  make  a  score  of  men  to  take 
his  place.  It  will  call  to  them,  struggle 
with  them,  lift  them  to  itself. 

Nothing  is  more  real  than  the  ideal. 
Mountains  are  made  of  vapor,  and  the  soil 
of  the  ground  is  as  the  dust  of  clouds  be- 
side it.  Brick  and  mortar  are  built  upon 
it.  Bronze  and  steel  and  gold  and  silver 
—  the  hands  of  men  and  the  fingers  of 
machines — wait  upon  it.  The  sheer  mate- 
rial forces  swung  into  its  mighty  service  — 
the  levers  with  which  it  lifts  this  little  earth, 
dictating  events,  dominating  nations,  guid- 
ing philosophies,  placing  a  strip  of  sky 
over  every  life,  whirling  the  globe  to  every 


Cbc  Empbasts  of  tbc  f  deal  15 


morning  with  a  hope — the  world  itself  is  the 
massive  measure  of  the  spirit,  the  shadow 
God  casts  across  time  and  space  in  stone  and 
iron  and  fleeting  things,  of  the  dreams  of  men. 
The  peculiar  coordination  of  powers 
gathered  into  an  ideal,  a  hero,  and  called 
his  personality,  we  may  dissolve.  We  may 
dissolve  him  into  the  forces  of  his  time. 
We  may  dissolve  him  into  his  ancestors. 
But  he  is  there.  As  a  logical  ideal  he 
passes  into  life.  His  spirit  possesses  the 
world.  In  analyzing  the  inspirations  of 
the  Pentateuch,  in  showing  the  several 
men  that  Moses  may  have  been,  Moses  is 
not  removed.  We  are  but  given  the  gene- 
alogy of  his  greatness.  If  he  might  have 
been,  he  was;  and  whether  he  is  a  prophet 
or  the  prophecy  of  a  prophet,  he  is  a  per- 
sonal actuality  in  human  life,  and  one  with 
which  to  live.  Proving  that  he  is  a  group 
of  men  cannot  destroy  him,  any  more  than 
the  slip  of  a  scholar's  pen  could  have  cre- 
ated him.  If  it  cannot  be  said  of  a  man 
named  Moses  that  he  incarnated  all  of 
such  a  spirit  once,  it  can  be  said  that  the 


16  Cbe  SbaDow  Cbriet 


spirit  has  become  his  incarnation, —  that 
the  incarnation  of  the  Spirit  which  Christ 
reserved  as  the  supreme  and  mightiest 
form  of  His  Messiahship,  has  come  through 
the  lives  of  men  to  this  soul  of  Sinai,  that  it 
has  made  him  one  of  the  dominant  person- 
alities in  the  building  of  a  world.  He  can- 
not be  ignored  as  a  fact — one  kind  of  fact 
— and  he  defies  the  necessity,  the  moral 
helplessness,  of  being  dependent  upon  an- 
other. He  is  a  father  of  facts,  though  he 
be  a  myth.  The  margin  of  the  Bible  does 
not  hold  the  fate  of  its  great  beliefs  in  its 
calculations,  and  the  soul  of  Moses  does 
not  rest  upon  the  skill  of  experts. 

Shakspere  would  be  none  the  less  a  per- 
sonality whether  he  ever  existed  or  not. 
If  three  poets  had  written  the  plays  we  call 
by  his  name,  they  would  still  represent  a 
colossal  individuality — a  three-poet-power 
spirit.  Whether  He  who  governs  the  dis- 
position of  forces  blended  the  three  actu- 
ally into  one  manifold  life  Himself,  or  left 
it  to  the  world  and  the  action  of  events  to 
do  it — makes  an  interesting  and  important, 


tlbc  Bmpbaste  of  tbe  "ffDeal  17 


but  not  fundamental,  fact  with  regard  to 
the  content  of  his  genius.  The  genius  is 
here.  It  is  a  truth.  How  he  came  to  be 
here  is  a  question  of  fact. 

The  great  spiritual  unities,  when  once 
they  have  come  forth  and  faced  the  earth, 
when  they  have  been  wrought  into  its 
experiences,  when  they  have  become  the 
builders  of  its  facts — have  become  material 
in  the  most  material  sense ;  it  is  only  the 
passing  phase,  the  morbid  literalness  of 
our  scientific  spirit,  which  could  have  made 
the  nobler  unities  so  dependent  on  the 
smaller  ones  as  to  imperil  faith. 

In  tracing  the  evolution  of  the  Christ 
idea,  there  would  be  a  superficial  and  plau- 
sible convenience  in  arranging  chronology 
so  that  Job  would  come  between  David 
and  Isaiah;  but,  according  to  the  content 
of  his  message  and  the  unities  of  the  truth, 
Job  furnishes  the  link  between  David  and 
Isaiah,  though  he  prepared  his  message, 
perhaps,  in  an  aloof  life,  and  may  have 
been  singing  in  one  wilderness  while  Moses 
was  ruling  in  another. 


i8  abe  Sba&ow  Obrtst 


Indomitably  relevant,  a  great  man  places 
himself,  like  a  great  truth,  where  the  tyr- 
inny  of  circumstance,  the  commands  of 
time  and  place,  are  beneath  his  feet.  He 
partakes  of  the  ways  of  God.  In  the  dis- 
tinction between  the  truth,  which  is  the 
spirit,  and  the  fact,  which  is  the  incident 
of  the  spirit,  lies  the  only  defense  of  the 
great  Scriptural  ideals.  Ideals  can  only 
be  defended  by  ideals.  The  facts,  though 
they  have  incalculable  modifying  value, 
did  not  create  the  truth.  They  can  neither 
save  nor  destroy  it 


IV 

Ibagar  IRation 


UPON  our  unshamed  Gentile  lips  there 
shall  be  no  unhallowed  criticism  of  the 
saddened  prophet-people  that  walk  alone 
before  the  nations  of  the  earth,  with  the 
fire  of  the  old  expectancy  still  beautiful  in 
their  eyes. 

Guilty,  for  hundreds  of  years,  of  a  per- 
secution which  is  the  vastest  cowardice  of 
history;  as  disgraced  men,  who  have  re- 
venged with  eighteen  vindictive  centuries 
the  pitiful  blunder  of  a  day,  —  only  in  the 
utmost  humbleness,  with  the  tenderness  of 
the  One  we  cherish,  shall  the  Gentiles  say, 
"  Thou  didst  crucify  Him,"  or  dare  accuse 
the  mightier  nation  for  that  one  vast,  swift 
moment,  which  shall  be  forever  its  awful 
title  to  more  love  and  more  forgiveness 

19 


20  abe  SbaDow  Cbrist 


than  all  the  nations  of  the  earth — because 
they  took  the  cross  that  we  would  have 
had  ready,  and  did  our  crucifying  for  us. 
The  silence  of  Christ  shall  descend  upon 
our  brother's  head  to-day  from  those  who, 
in  the  century  when  He  came,  would  have 
led  Him  as  a  lamb  to  the  slaughter  in  one 
year  instead  of  three — who  were  not  beau- 
tiful enough  among  the  nations  to  have  His 
mother  born  amongst  us,  or  great  enough 
to  gather  the  traditions  or  sing  the  dreams 
that  should  feed  the  childhood  of  a  god. 

A  nation,  the  inspiration  of  whose  very 
sins  has  furnished  the  imperative  religion, 
and  compelled  the  mightiest  literature  of 
the  world, — a  nation  which  has  given  the 
most  sublime  and  consummate  expression 
of  repentance  in  all  the  unfolding  of  the 
human  heart, —  never  to  be  forgiven  itself, 
— at  whose  feet  the  peoples  of  the  earth 
have  learned  to  sing  and  learned  to  pray, — 
without  whom  never  would  the  knowledge 
have  come  to  us  to  condemn  them,  or  the 
spirit  with  which  to  judge  them,  or  the 
Christ  with  which  to  be  superior  to  them, 


Gbe  t>agar  nation  21 


—  that  the  Pharisee  might  be  rehearsed 
again. 

Suffering  under  the  supreme  misfortune 
of  being  chosen  of  God,  of  being  the  most 
divinely  exposed  race,  working  out  in  its 
glowing  public  soul  the  salvation  of  us  all, 
dedicating  its  very  sins  to  humanity  (sins 
sublimely  remembered  only  because  they 
were  immortally  confessed)  —  the  Jewish 
nation  has  been  condemned  by  those 
whose  sins  are  not  even  remembered — 
ignobly  forgotten;  and  in  a  world  which 
the  Jew  has  made  possible,  we  look  about 
us  but  to  find  that  he  is  held  responsible 
for  his  crimes,  as  if  they  were  peculiar  to 
himself,  while  his  genius  for  God  has  been 
appropriated  as  the  universal  discovery  of 
men,  by  peoples  who  would  not  have 
known  that  the  crimes  were  crimes,  had 
not  the  Jews  in  psalms  and  prophecies 
taught  the  stammering  nations  what  sin 
was,  until,  sinning  one  more  sin,  in  the 
shadow  of  the  Cross,  they  fled  from  before 
the  faces  of  men,  with  a  confession  which 
is  the  gospel  of  the  earth. 


20  abe  Sba&ow  Cbrtat 


than  all  the  nations  of  the  earth — because 
they  took  the  cross  that  we  would  have 
had  ready,  and  did  our  crucifying  for  us. 
The  silence  of  Christ  shall  descend  upon 
our  brother's  head  to-day  from  those  who, 
in  the  century  when  He  came,  would  have 
led  Him  as  a  lamb  to  the  slaughter  in  one 
year  instead  of  three — who  were  not  beau- 
tiful enough  among  the  nations  to  have  His 
mother  born  amongst  us,  or  great  enough 
to  gather  the  traditions  or  sing  the  dreams 
that  should  feed  the  childhood  of  a  god. 

A  nation,  the  inspiration  of  whose  very 
sins  has  furnished  the  imperative  religion, 
and  compelled  the  mightiest  literature  of 
the  world, — a  nation  which  has  given  the 
most  sublime  and  consummate  expression 
of  repentance  in  all  the  unfolding  of  the 
human  heart, —  never  to  be  forgiven  itself, 
— at  whose  feet  the  peoples  of  the  earth 
have  learned  to  sing  and  learned  to  pray, — 
without  whom  never  would  the  knowledge 
have  come  to  us  to  condemn  them,  or  the 
spirit  with  which  to  judge  them,  or  the 
Christ  with  which  to  be  superior  to  them, 


Cbc  Dagar  "Ration  21 


—  that  the  Pharisee  might  be  rehearsed 
again. 

Suffering  under  the  supreme  misfortune 
of  being  chosen  of  God,  of  being  the  most 
divinely  exposed  race,  working  out  in  its 
glowing  public  soul  the  salvation  of  us  all, 
dedicating  its  very  sins  to  humanity  (sins 
sublimely  remembered  only  because  they 
were  immortally  confessed)  —  the  Jewish 
nation  has  been  condemned  by  those 
whose  sins  are  not  even  remembered — 
ignobly  forgotten;  and  in  a  world  which 
the  Jew  has  made  possible,  we  look  about 
us  but  to  find  that  he  is  held  responsible 
for  his  crimes,  as  if  they  were  peculiar  to 
himself,  while  his  genius  for  God  has  been 
appropriated  as  the  universal  discovery  of 
men,  by  peoples  who  would  not  have 
known  that  the  crimes  were  crimes,  had 
not  the  Jews  in  psalms  and  prophecies 
taught  the  stammering  nations  what  sin 
was,  until,  sinning  one  more  sin,  in  the 
shadow  of  the  Cross,  they  fled  from  before 
the  faces  of  men,  with  a  confession  which 
is  the  gospel  of  the  earth. 


24  Sbe  Sba&ow  Cbrtst 


there  has  never  been  a  time  in  history 
when  a  Jew  would  not  rather  have  given 
up  all  that  he  had  and  all  that  he  was 
rather  than  give  up  being  the  son  of  Abra- 
ham and  Isaac  and  Jacob,  and  beginning 
his  prayers  with  the  beautiful  title  for  God 
that  was  woven  of  his  fathers'  names. 

He  has  kept  the  commandment  without 
a  "Thou  shalt  not"  in  it.  He  has  always 
kept  it.  There  is  nothing  he  will  not  do 
to  keep  it — except  keeping  the  other  com- 
mandments; an  exception  that  he  shares 
with  a  world  which  has  learned  almost 
everything  from  the  poor  Jew's  sins  except 
not  sinning  them — a  world  which  did  not 
even  have  the  "Thou  shalt  nots "  to  sin 
against. 

Ever  since  the  Bible  commenced  with 
pointing  out  the  fruit  that  could  not  be 
eaten,  prohibition  has  been  the  one  invita- 
tion that  the  human  heart  was  sure  to  ac- 
cept, and  the  profound  failure  of  the  Ten 
Commandments  in  the  Jewish  nation  was 
the  nine  negatives.  The  first  form  of  the 
Hebrew  conception  of  duty — that  is,  the 


Cbou  Sbalt  Hot  25 


typical  human  conception  of  duty — was 
No.  There  are  promises,  but  the  promises 
are  given  to  those  who  will  not  turn  to 
idols,  and  those  who  will  not  marry  the 
Philistines.  The  Beatitudes  of  the  Old 
Testament  are  "  Blessed  are  the  ones  who 
will  not" 

There  has  never  been  a  people  in  the 
wide  world  who  started  their  national  life 
with  so  definite  an  idea  of  what  they  were 
not  to  do.  The  Old  Testament  is  as  largely 
a  book  of  prohibitions  as  the  New  Tes- 
tament is  of  invitations.  The  prophet 
preaches  "  If  you  do  not,"  and  the  prevail- 
ing tone  of  the  gospel  is  "  If  you  do  ";  and 
with  prophets  anointed  to  go  from  place  to 
place  making  inspired  objections,  Jehovah 
was  known  by  what  he  would  not  allow, 
his  servants  by  what  they  avoided,  and 
even  the  positive  blessings  are  the  rewards 
of  negations;  the  evolution  of  a  series  of 
righteous  acts  thus  inevitably  becoming  in 
Jewish  history  the  evolution  of  a  series  of 
last  resorts.  Duty  is  the  Alternative. 

And  yet  the  negative  tone  of  the  Ten 


26  abe  Sba&ow  Gbrfst 


Commandments  was  supremely  logical.  The 
field  of  vision  was  the  wrong.  There  were 
nine  things  the  children  of  Israel  were  do- 
ing that  they  ought  not  to  do.  There  was 
one  that  they  had  better  continue  to  do. 
The  Commandments  addressed  themselves 
to  the  point. 

A  negative  is  but  the  rudimentary  form 
of  a  positive,  and  there  is  a  latent  affirma- 
tive throughout  all  the  Mosaic  tendency. 
But  the  Ten  Commandments  were  not  neg- 
ative merely  because  of  the  low  plane  of 
spiritual  life  among  the  people.  Moses  had 
commenced  his  career  by  saying  that  he 
could  not  be  a  prophet,  and  the  negative 
was  the  instinctive  and  necessary  approach 
of  his  spirit  to  the  truth.  Fifteen  hundred 
years  of  Hebrew  history  are  stamped  with 
the  individuality  of  one  in  whom  the  love 
of  God  was  wrought  out  as  an  imperious 
obligation  to  do  other  than  he  would. 
The  austerity  of  the  Decalogue  was  Moses' 
sternness  toward  the  tenderness  in  himself. 
For  not  out  of  a  mighty  aloofness  from  sin, 
but  out  of  a  mightier  intimacy  with  its  aw- 


Cbou  Sbalt  Wot  27 


ful  will,  had  this  leader  of  Israel  struggled 
to  the  top  of  Sinai  and  under  the  eaves 
of  the  heavens  written  the  desires  of  his 
heart.  Lying  at  the  feet  of  the  Most  High, 
striking  with  a  burning  pen  across  every 
desire  the  terrible,  beautiful  "Thou  Shalt 
Not,"  he  was  prophet  of  the  struggle, 
prophet  of  the  struggle  with  himself,  writ- 
ing commandments  out  of  his  conquered 
sins, — weary  commandments, — too  spent 
with  victory  to  sing,  too  dread  of  defeat  to 
sing — the  infinite  No,  and  silence.  And 
thus  as  the  first  and  necessary  stage  of  the 
divine  affirmative,  No  shall  stand — the 
eternal  symbol  of  the  sublime,  unwilling 
inspiration  of  the  human  heart. 

Only  the  No  had  been  lived,  and  only 
the  No  could  be  prophesied. 


VI 

TTbou  Sbalt  "Rot 

ii 

THE  men  that  Christ  addressed  needed 
prohibitions  quite  as  much  as  the  freed 
slaves  at  the  foot  of  Sinai.  It  was  the 
achievement  of  the  spiritual  experience 
called  the  Old  Testament  that  the  Beati- 
tudes did  not  read  as  Moses  would  have 
made  them :  "  Unblessed  are  they  that 
mourn  not,  for  they  shall  not  be  comforted." 
"  Unblessed  are  they  which  hunger  and 
thirst  not  after  righteousness,  for  they  shall 
not  be  filled."  "  Cursed  are  the  unmerci- 
ful, for  they  shall  obtain  no  mercy."  When 
Peter  was  taking  his  denials  back,  and  the 
nails  were  being  driven  through  his  hands, 
there  were  no  mighty  "Thou  shalt  nots" 
echoing  over  the  pain  he  had  longed  for; 
nor  was  there  a  voice  calling  to  his  cross, 

28 


Sbalt  "Mot  29 


"  Unblessed  are  ye  when  men  shall  not  re- 
vile you  and  persecute  you  for  my  sake." 

"  Simon,  Simon,  son  of  Jonas,  lovest 
thou  me?" 

In  the  darkness  and  the  swoon : 

"  THOU  KNOWEST  THAT  I  LOVE  THEE." 

The  boast  of  a  dead  face. 

But  Peter  would  not  have  died  for  the 
Decalogue — for  nine  things  he  could  not 
do  and  one  that  he  must.  Jesus  did  not 
say,  "  If  you  do  not  come  unto  me,  all  ye 
that  labor  and  are  heavy  laden,  I  will  not 
give  you  rest."  The  soul  had  lived  beyond 
the  No,  and  thus  while  the  Man  of  Galilee 
was  wont  to  tell  a  man  to  love  his  wife, 
Moses  had  been  wont  to  put  the  case, 
"Thou  shalt  not  commit  adultery."  And 
in  Exodus,  "Love  thy  neighbor  as  thyself" 
is  "Thou  shalt  not  kill,"  a  statement  not 
only  failing  to  be  the  best  means  of  teach- 
ing the  son  of  Abraham  to  love  his  neigh- 
bor as  himself,  but  not  even  the  best  means 
of  keeping  his  neighbor  alive. 

Without  doubt  it  was  one  of  Bathsheba's 
charms  that  she  was  Uriah's  wife;  but 


30  Gbe  Sbafcow  Cbrist 

David  killed  Uriah  because  Bathsheba  was 
beautiful  and  the  Decalogue  was  not.  If, 
like  the  soul  of  Christ,  the  sixth  command- 
ment could  have  seemed  to  love  David 
back,  if  it  could  have  been  positive,  if  it  had 
been  something  that  could  have  set  his 
pulses  beating  and  drawn  him  to  itself,  it. 
would  have  saved  the  murder  of  Uriah; 
but  the  sixth  commandment  was  a  Not- 
something.  David  had  to  break  it  to  learn 
what  it  was.  Like  death,  it  had  a  hollow 
voice,  and  to  sin  or  to  die  is  to  pass  into 
the  land  where  it  speaks,  and  learn  the 
concealed  affirmative. 

The  sturdy  saints  of  the  Old  Testament 
learned  the  Commandments  by  breaking 
them.  Through  positive  experience  God 
wrought  his  Great  Negations  into  history, 
and  made  the  way  across  crime  and  peni- 
tential psalms  to  The  Great  Assertions. 

The  Old  Testament  would  be  the  most 
discouraging  book  in  the  world  to  read 
without  knowing  that  a  new  one  followed 
it.  The  Bible  is  the  evolution  of  an  em- 
phasis; its  beauty  through  all  the  Mosaic 


Sbalt  "Hot  31 


influence  being  the  strenuous  and  terrible 
beauty,  the  sublime  consciousness,  of  the 
Infinite  No,  until  at  last  it  breaks  forth  in 
the  most  beautiful  words  that  were  ever 
sung — the  Infinite  Yes  —  the  prophecy 
of  Jesus  the  Christ.  Peter  and  Paul  and 
John  saw  afterward.  They  reaffirmed  the 
affirmed.  But  Isaiah,  singing  out  of  his 
broken  life  and  his  broken  nation  to  the 
people  of  the  Thou  Shalt  Not,  is  the  most 
heroic  spirit  in  the  annals  of  men,  because 
he  sounded  the  victorious  affirmative  that 
has  become  forever  the  courage  and  the 
destiny  of  human  life. 


VII 

Ubou  Sbalt  IRot 

in 

IT  is  a  fundamental  criticism  upon  the 
Ten  Commandments  that  they  could  not 
be  chanted ;  that  the  Israelites  sang  about 
Jehovah  and  what  he  had  done,  but  they 
did  not  sing  about  what  he  had  told  them 
to  do — and  that  is  why  they  never  did  it. 
It  is  the  eternal  symbol  of  ethics, —  the 
conception  of  duty  that  cannot  sing  must 
weep  until  it  learns  to  sing.  This  is  Jewish 
history. 

Nothing  could  be  more  characteristic  of 
the  Hebrew  than  the  way  he  left  Egypt. 
He  did  not  know  where  he  was  going;  he 
knew  from  what  he  must  get  away,  and 
from  the  beginning  he  comes  to  his  moral- 
ity somewhat  as  he  came  to  the  Red  Sea, 
expecting  not  only  a  force  to  drive  him 

32 


Cbou  Sbalt  1Rot  33 


into  righteousness,  but  a  miracle  to  help 
him  through  with  it.  The  Ten  Command- 
ments could  not  be  more  exuberant  than 
the  inspired  experience  of  the  great  Sinai 
leader,  and  could  not  but  breathe  forth  in 
their  very  form  the  sublime  unwillingness 
and  the  bare  victory  with  which  they  were 
wrought  out 

The  fact  that  Moses  was  not  allowed  to 
enter  the  Promised  Land  is  one  of  the  reve- 
lations of  the  Old  Testament.  He  was  not 
a  Canaan  prophet.  He  was  an  out-of- 
Egypt  prophet ;  and  it  will  always  be  the 
indictment  of  Israel  that  they  were  willing 
to  live  so  many  years  in  the  Promised 
Land  upon  the  inspirations  of  one  who  was 
not  allowed  to  enter  it — a  primary  prophet, 
inspired  with  a  timely  ignorance  and  a 
timely  truth,  whose  message  it  was  to  tell 
all  men  that  they  must  not  be  what  they 
were,  but  whose  greater  message  will  ever 
be  that  prophets  must  not  be  what  Moses 
was.  And  while  it  is  but  the  charity  of  the 
historic  sense  to  place  every  great  soul  in 
the  frame  of  his  time,  and  love  him  for  the 


34  tfbe  Sbafcow  Cbriet 


long  heroic  generations  that  he  must  have 
lived  beyond  his  brothers;  and  while  no 
vaster  soul  shall  ever  be  held  accountable 
for  the  degraded  ways  in  which  little  men 
have  used  his  inspirations  to  stop  the  world; 
it  is  but  a  tribute  to  him  who  first  took  the 
shoes  from  off  his  feet  and  walked  on  holy 
ground  before  the  presence  of  the  Lord, 
to  hold  his  great  name  strictly  within  that 
beautiful  fitness  in  which  God  gave  it  to 
the  world.  To  the  children  of  the  Christ 
shall  Sinai  rest  forever  under  the  shadow 
of  Nebo,  nor  may  we  ever  forget  that,  by 
the  decree  of  God,  the  prophet  of  the  wil- 
derness belongs  to  the  Wilderness  himself. 
Hero  of  the  Eternal  No — we  can  almost 
see  him  now,  standing  on  the  Moab  hills, 
with  the  pathos  of  the  shut-out  years 
pressed  down  upon  his  mighty  spirit,  trying 
to  look  with  shaded  eyes  through  the  great 
cloud  doors  of  heaven  upon  the  land  that 
was  the  promise  of  the  people  that  he  loved. 
Brave  First  Listener  —  with  the  old  Jeho- 
vah voices  sounding  dim  and  far,  with  the 
ache  of  those  unconquered  cities  in  his  heart, 


Cbou  Sbalt  Dot  35 

turning  back  to  Nebo  to  lie  down  with 
God.  The  silence  folds  him — with  no 
children  near;  the  winds,  the  low- voiced 
winds,  beautiful  wanderers  from  the  haunts 
of  men,  come  gently  where  he  is,  and  with 
unseen  hands  touch  the  softened  command- 
ment face ;  and  the  Sunset  comes  and  looks, 
and  the  Night,  and  there  is  One  to  watch. 
So  comes  to  pass  the  wonderful  never- 
coming-back  that  men  call  death  —  the 
lonely  death  that,  like  his  lonely  life,  God 
kept  for  a  beautiful  secret  to  himself. 


VIII 
TTbus  Saitb  tbe 


FIFTEEN  hundred  years  more  beautiful 
than  Moses,  John  of  the  Jordan  wilderness 
comes  to  us,  the  last  refinement  and  the 
highest  development  of  the  Mosaic  ten- 
dency. Standing  in  the  great  assertive 
moment  of  history  with  the  most  specific 
and  immediate  Positive  that  ever  fell  from 
the  lips  of  man,  there  seems  to  have  gath- 
ered in  him  the  residuum  of  that  inspired 
negative  which  from  the  beginning  had 
dominated  the  Hebrew  life. 

With  all  the  dreaming  and  the  living  that 
had  come  between  ;  with  the  mighty  modu- 
lations that  had  been  wrought  in  the  voice 
of  Sinai  by  the  great  Invitation  Singers, 
and  those  full-hearted  ones  whom  God  had 
anointed  to  expect,  it  would  be  an  exag- 


Gbus  Saitb  tbc  XorO  37 


geration  to  say  that  John,  the  herald  of 
Jesus,  was  a  kind  of  contemporary  Moses, 
facing  God  in  Galilee  as  the  leader  of  Sinai 
had  faced  him  in  the  burning  bush.  But 
it  would  not  be  an  idle  exaggeration,  and 
has  within  its  doubtful  boundaries  a  certain 
capacity  to  work  out  a  thought  for  us.  Per- 
haps it  is  more  the  picturesqueness  of  John's 
position  in  history  than  John  himself,  but 
whether  he  is  really  more  illustrative  or  not, 
he  certainly  is  more  availably  illustrative  of 
the  Old-Testament  "  Thus  saith  the  Lord  " 
than  the  Old  Testament  itself.  Standing  in 
high  relief  against  the  divine  life,  he  drama- 
tizes the  commanding  ethical  conception 
of  fifteen  centuries.  It  is  placed  in  him 
once  and  forever,  bold  and  strong  beside  the 
conception  of  eternity.  With  all  that  exu- 
berant atmosphere  of  promise  that  a  herald 
must  always  have,  John  surely  had  about 
him  a  haunting  spirit  from  far  back  in 
the  years,  a  glorified  "THOU  SHALT  NOT," 
which  made  him  as  negative  as  a  herald 
could  be,  and  be  a  herald. 

As  a  method  either  in  ethics  or  religion, 


136494 


33  Cbc  SbaOow  Cbriat 


the  lineal  descendant  of  No  is  MUST.  The 
spirit  which  in  the  rudimentary  stages  of 
prophecy  had  caused  the  law  to  be  stated 
in  negations  is  the  same  spirit  which  in  the 
rudimentary  stages  of  the  Christian  truth 
causes  the  gospel  to  be  stated  in  obligations. 
Obligation  was  John's  way  of  stating  it. 

The  contrasts  that  have  been  contrived 
between  the  law  on  the  one  side  and  the 
gospel  on  the  other  have  long  since  receded 
from  our  thought,  and  except  as  conveni- 
ences for  the  stronger  statement  of  lower 
and  developing  phases  of  the  great  para- 
dox, they  stand  as  added  symbols  of  that 
trait  of  finiteness,  that  whimsical  dogmatism, 
that  must  ever  be  detected,  as  the  years  go 
on,  in  the  deciduous  theology  of  men. 

That  God  is  Love,  and  that  Law  is  the 
way  he  loves  us,  and  that  God  is  Law,  and 
that  Love  is  the  way  he  rules  us,  must  be 
an  assured  principle  in  any  Messianic  pre- 
sentation of  the  truth.  Until  we  can  separ- 
ate God  from  God  or  make  him  superior 
to  himself,  there  is  but  one  God  and  he  is 
the  God  of  the  Law,  and  Jesus  is  its  mighty 


Cbus  Sattb  tbe  lord  39 


Adjective.  The  question  before  all  the  fol- 
lowing saviors  of  the  world  is  not  one  of 
law  or  one  of  gospel,  but  a  question  as  to 
the  most  inspired  statement  of  the  gospel 
law.  This  is  the  question  that  John  asked 
Jesus — "  Art  thou  he  that  should  come,  or 
look  we  for  another  ?  " 

It  was  before  he  had  heard  of  Christ's 
evangelistic  methods  that  John  had  called 
him  "  One  the  latchet  of  whose  shoes  I  am 
not  worthy  to  unloose."  Looking  almost 
out  of  his  grave  to  watch  himself  being 
forgotten,  the  John  in  the  prisoner's  cell 
was  too  essentially  a  preacher  not  to  ques- 
tion the  Son  of  God  because  he  was  differ- 
ent from  himself.  When  his  disciples  re- 
turned to  him  with  "Do  you  not  remember, 
John,  those  old  sermons  of  yours,  the  city 
trooping  out  to  meet  you  —  strong  men 
crying  out  with  a  sense  of  their  disobedi- 
ence— the  long  lines  of  weeping  penitents 
that  you  baptized  in  the  river  ?  " — when,  as 
the  shadows  grew  long  in  the  cell,  they  told 
him  the  words  of  Christ,  "  Come  unto  me 
all  ye  that  labor  and  are  heavy  laden  and  I 


40  cbc  Sba&ow  Cbrtat 


will  give  you  rest,"  there  came  into  the 
broken  old  prophet's  heart  the  thought  of 
that  greatest  sermon  of  his  life  and  the 
mighty  climax  of  it,  "Who  hath  warned 
you  to  flee  from  the  wrath  to  come  ?  His 
fan  is  in  his  hand.  He  will  gather  his  wheat 
into  his  garner,  but  he  will  burn  up  the  chaff 
with  unquenchable  fire."  And  the  more  he 
heard  about  Jesus,  his  inscrutable  "  Abide 
in  me,"  his  eating  with  publicans,  his  divine, 
disreputable  love  for  every  one, —  the  more 
he  wondered  how  this  disastrous  tenderness 
could  belong  to  one  in  whose  face  he  had 
seen,  one  wonderful  day,  the  shining  of  God. 

If  Jesus  had  approached  the  woman  at 
the  well  with  the  air  of  being  better  than 
she  was,  she  would  either  have  doubted  it 
or  hated  him  for  it.  It  was  because  he  of- 
fered her  the  most  perfect  fellowship  at  first, 
and  afterward  told  her  all  that  she  ever  did, 
that  he  was  the  Son  of  God. 

It  is  because  John  would  have  com- 
menced with  the  seven  husbands  and  would 
have  conditioned  his  fellowship,  that  on 
hearing  the  rumors  of  Jesus  he  sent  word 


Saltb  tbe  XorD  41 


to  him  "  Art  thou  he  that  should  come,  or 
look  we  for  another?  "  It  was  the  residuum 
of  the  negative.  It  was  the  law  trying  to 
state  the  gospel  and  the  obligation  stating 
the  invitation  —  a  way  of  reaching  men 
which  Christ  himself  was  never  eloquent 
enough  to  attempt  —  to  whom  it  has  ever 
belonged  to  reveal,  from  the  very  first,  a  fel- 
lowship divinely  unconditioned  except  by 
blindness  in  men  themselves  —  the  distinc- 
tive prerogative  of  whose  mighty  heart  has 
ever  been  the  beautiful  recklessness  with 
which  he  opened  it  and  kept  it  forever 
open. 

The  law  with  an  open  heart  is  the  gospel. 
The  law  with  the  heart  open  first. 

God  may  be  as  frank  as  he  will.  It  is 
the  littleness  of  love  that  has  taught  us  con- 
ditions and  economies.  The  conditions  of 
fellowship  make  themselves.  The  irrever- 
ent seeing  of  too  much  love,  like  the  seeing 
of  too  many  stars,  is  guarded  forever  by 
blindness.  A  great  heart  keeps  its  secrets 
like  the  sky,  by  being  open. 

Though  a  merely  apparent  refusal  and 


42  cbc  SbaDow  Cbrtet 


but  Moses'  way  of  stating  his  fear  to  look, 
the  Lord's  refusal  to  let  Moses  see  his  face 
is  one  of  the  root-principles  of  the  Deca- 
logue. John  was  the  spiritual  descendant 
of  a  prophet  who  would  have  been  ruined 
at  Sinai  if  he  had  let  the  children  of  Israel 
become  too  familiar  with  him.  It  was  ap- 
propriate that  he  should  go  out  into  the 
wilderness  of  Jordan  to  keep  his  influence. 
His  doctrine  depended  upon  the  wilderness, 
and  John  was  too  thorough  a  theologian  to 
be  an  immediate  convert  to  one  who  both 
by  temperament  and  destiny  kept  out  of  it, 
and  mingled  with  men. 

The  most  characteristic  sentence  that 
Jesus  ever  uttered  was  "  Follow  me,"  and 
it  is  because  the  spirit  of  the  Old  Testament 
says  "  Go,"  and  the  spirit  of  the  New  says 
"  Come,"  that  we  know  that  God  has  been 
upon  the  earth. 

The  emphasis  of  the  Old  Testament  is  in 
the  second  person.  Its  whole  attitude  is 
"Thou,"  and  the  New  Testament  which 
came  with  Christ  is  a  revealed  WE  from 
beginning  to  end  —  the  mutual  book  in 


Saftb  tbe  Xorfc  43 


which  the  Law  lived  with  the  disciples,  the 
terrible  "Thus  saith  the  Lord"  kneeling 
down  before  a  few  unknowing  fishermen 
to  wash  their  feet.  The  real  distinction 
between  Jesus  and  his  disciples  was  his  in- 
credible approachableness — that  he  could 
get  nearer  to  men  than  men  could.  The 
Son  of  God  because  he  would  almost 
rather  have  been  called  the  son  of  man, 
he  abolished  forever  the  Divinity  of  Dis- 
tance and  made  fellowship  the  supreme 
attribute  of  God.  With  heroic  simplicity 
he  risked  his  mission  on  the  earth,  and 
founded  his  title  to  be  the  ruler  of  men 
upon  letting  them  be  familiar  with  him. 
This  is  the  most  sublime  and  daring  ad- 
venture in  the  history  of  truth.  The 
gospel  consisted  in  knowing  him.  Re- 
demption consisted  in  living  with  him. 
Salvation,  impossible  as  an  act,  became  in- 
evitable as  an  acquaintance,  and  the  whole 
New  Testament  wins  our  hearts  because 
our  hearts  are  woven  into  it.  Peter's 
epistles  being  published  with  his  denials 
and  Paul's  sermons  with  Christ's  —  it  is  a 


44  Cbe  Sbasow  Cbrfst 


shared  book,  in  which  God  and  men  tell 
how  they  have  loved  and  judged  each 
other. 

Entering  into  the  You  and  I,  beginning 
to  see  duty  from  above,  instead  of  seeing 
it  from  below — surrounding  it  with  God 
—  this  is  knowing  what  duty  is.  The  op- 
portunity that  He  and  we  have  together. 

The  difference  between  the  "  Thus  saith 
the  Lord  "  and  the  "  Abide  in  me  "  no  man 
has  ever  told.  At  once  the  sublimest  and 
tenderest  truth  in  all  the  wandering  of  the 
human  heart  —  the  answer  of  the  wistful- 
ness  of  thousands  of  sad  dead  years  —  there 
is  nothing  beautiful  enough  to  say  about  it 
— except  silence  and  living — and  living — 
and  living. 


IX 

an& 


ON  some  accounts  the  best  time  to  have 
been  a  preacher  was  just  before  Christ. 
Zechariah  and  Malachi  had  a  great  advan- 
tage in  preaching  Jehovah  to  their  congre- 
gations. No  one  could  ask  for  better  ma- 
terial for  powerful  sermons  than  the  minor 
prophets  had  —  which  explains  their  being 
minor  prophets.  Their  sermons  were  all 
worked  out  for  them.  Preaching  was  sheer 
history.  The  bare  facts  of  the  Hebrew 
national  life  were  brutally  on  the  side  of 
the  preacher.  A  Hebrew  audience  could 
almost  have  been  converted  with  a  map; 
and  spiritual  insight,  dramatic  genius,  or 
subtlety  of  philosophy,  or  ingenuity  of 
statement  would  hardly  seem  to  have  been 
necessary  to  make  a  profound  impression 


Sbatow  Cbrist 


upon  the  Jew.  His  doctrines  had  dates 
and  places ;  his  belief  was  what  had  hap- 
pened to  him ;  his  convictions  were  events, 
and  the  events  said  just  what  the  prophets 
wanted  them  to. 

Wickedness  was  never  remunerative  in 
the  Old  Testament.  The  catast'rophes  that 
came  upon  the  wicked  were  all  accurately 
timed  and  overwhelmingly  convincing.  It 
was  a  book  to  delight  a  preacher's  heart 
—  the  Arabian  Nights  of  goodness.  It 
had  the  appeal  of  appeals  to  the  mass  of 
men.  Zechariah  and  Malachi  were  fortu- 
nate in  being  preachers  just  at  the  end 
of  an  Ancient  Book,  in  which  everything 
came  out  right,  and  just  before  the  begin- 
ning of  a  New  one,  in  which  everything 
came  out  divinely  and  sublimely  wrong. 

Jehovah  began  with  what  his  children 
could  understand  — with  stories  —  with  tel- 
ling them  what  he  would  give  them  if  they 
would  obey  him  —  a  new  playground  called 
Canaan  —  milk  and  honey. 

A  Bible  not  full  of  inventories  of  pro- 
perty written  with  a  naive  relish  that 


anD  fjoneg  47 


soothes  the  guilty  human  heart,  would  not 
be  human  enough  to  have  come  from  God, 
or  divine  enough  to  have  understood  hu- 
manity; the  only  difference  between  the 
Jews  and  the  Gentiles  in  the  love  of  gold 
being  that  the  former  gained  more  to  love. 
David  sings,  "  The  Lord  is  my  shepherd ; 
I  shall  not  want,"  and  the  fear  of  God  is 
the  fear  of  poverty,  and  faith  is  the  spiri- 
tual interpretation  of  gold.  The  Book 
of  Job,  sublime  in  being  an  exception,  is 
founded  on  the  wonder  of  a  righteous  man 
that  the  Lord  could  take  away  his  riches 
when  he  had  not  sinned.  Entering  the 
presence  of  the  Lord  with  his  teasing,  in- 
fidel swagger,  Satan  strikes  the  keynote 
of  the  Old  Testament,  "  Doth  Job  serve 
God  for  naught?"  —  the  first  anticipation 
of  Christ's  criticism  on  the  origin  of  the 
Jew  being  curiously  made  by  Satan  him- 
self, some  fifteen  hundred  years  before. 
The  Book  of  Job  begins  with  an  imposing 
processional  of  camels,  and  the  woe  of  it 
begins  with  the  fact  that  the  camels  are 
carried  away.  It  rises  by  sheer  force  of 


48  Gbe  SbaOow  Cbrtst 


personality  into  the  New-Testament  song 
of  suffering,  of  freedom,  of  noble  defiance 
of  reward  and  supreme  consciousness  of 
God ;  but  all  this  glowing  vision  of  the  soul 
moves  on  to  the  climax,  at  last,  of  1400 
sheep  and  6000  camels  and  1000  yoke  of 
oxen  and  1000  she-asses, —  the  necessary 
moral  to  the  Jewish  mind.  Sheep,  reli- 
gion, and  camels.  Righteousness,  milk,  and 
honey.  And  what  the  Jews  would  have 
done  with  the  Book  of  Job  if  it  had  had  a 
New-Testament  ending  they  told  the  world 
with  a  cross. 

Solomon  will  be  wise,  but  wise  enough  to 
be  rich.  The  story  of  the  Queen  of  Sheba 
gazing  on  his  glories  until  "she  had  no 
more  spirit  in  her  "  is  handed  down  from 
generation  to  generation  of  mothers,  to 
teach  children  morality  and  the  pomp  of 
righteousness;  and  John  himself,  writing 
after  Christ  and  trying  to  find  a  figure  that 
would  appeal  to  his  people,  brings  a  gold- 
loving  Bible  to  a  close  with  a  shining  He- 
brew picture  of  a  sapphire  heaven,  with 
pavements  of  the  root  of  evil  and  pearl 
gates  and  jasper  walls. 


and  "Bones  49 

"  Blessed  are  ye  when  men  shall  perse- 
cute you  "  was  not  the  text  that  led  the 
children  of  Israel  out  of  Egypt.  In  the 
childhood  of  religion,  their  Bible  is  the 
child  bible  of  the  human  heart.  "  He  that 
is  greatest  among  you  let  him  be  your  ser- 
vant "  would  not  have  been  the  watchword 
with  which  Abraham  acquired  his  fortune ; 
and  when  Joshua  led  the  people  over  Jor- 
dan, if  they  could  have  seen  the  crosses 
with  which  the  King  of  the  Jews  rewarded 
his  disciples,  they  would  have  turned  back 
to  Egypt. 

Christ's  stories  to  his  children  ended  in 
crosses ;  Moses*  in  flocks.  That  a  Bible 
that  had  failed  to  get  men  to  perform  their 
duties  by  placing  riches  at  the  end  of  them 
should  go  bravely  and  divinely  on  to  try 
to  get  them  to  perform  their  duties  with 
crosses  at  the  end  of  them  might  seem 
strange ;  but  crosses  were  more  practical, 
—  and  Jesus  was  the  Son  of  God  because 
he  knew  it. 

Abraham  is  converted  by  an  offer  of 
sheep  and  a  nation  of  grandchildren,  and 
his  Peradventure  prayer  is  one  of  the  great 
4 


Gbe  Sbafcow  Gbrist 


bargaining  classics  of  the  world.  When 
Jacob  wrestles  with  the  Angel  of  the  Lord, 
and,  getting  what  he  wants,  makes  it  the 
turning-point  of  his  life  and  falls  forth- 
with on  Esau's  neck,  and  is  a  good  and 
prosperous  saint  ever  afterwards,  it  would 
seem  to  make  the  best  possible  material 
for  teaching  ethics.  When  Joseph,  who  is 
the  religious  lad  of  the  family,  is  put  into 
a  well,  only  to  make  the  bad  brothers  bow 
the  knee  to  him  in  Egypt ;  when  he  resists 
temptation  in  Potiphar's  house  and  is  forth- 
with offered  the  Prime  Ministry  —  nothing 
could  be  better,  one  would  think,  for  im- 
pressing the  generations  with  a  proper  con- 
ception of  duty  than  this. 

Pharaoh  tries  to  be  boldly  wicked,  and 
the  twelve  plagues  announce  to  all  men 
that  it  does  not  pay ;  and  when  he  breaks 
his  word  and  pursues  Israel,  his  army 
dwindles  down  to  a  few  bubbles  rising 
from  the  bottom  of  the  sea. 

Amos  and  Haggai  had  all  these  facts  on 
their  side,  but  they  accomplished  nothing 
with  them.  The  Savior  of  Success  failed.  The 


anfc  t>oneg  51 


delicious  boyish  thrill  of  Haman's  leading 
the  beggar  Mordecai  in  the  king's  clothes 
around  the  city,  the  exultant  justice  of  Ha- 
man's hanging  on  the  gallows  he  had  pre- 
pared for  Mordecai,  would  make  a  climax 
in  a  sermon  to  men ;  but  it  failed.  In  the 
New  Testament  Mordecai  would  have  been 
hung,  and  Jesus,  committing  the  very  im- 
portant mistake  of  bearing  his  own  cross, 
conquers  the  nations  of  the  earth. 

Esther  weeping  for  joy  because  God  re- 
wards her  with  saving  her  people,  in  the 
New  Testament  is  Mary  weeping  in  the 
darkness  under  the  cry  of  her  child,  "  My 
God,  my  God,  why  hast  thou  forsaken 
me?" 

Daniel,  made  Lord  High  Chancellor  for 
saying  his  prayers  under  Darius,  under 
Christ  is  Peter ;  "  Lord,  I  am  ready  to  go 
with  thee  both  into  prison  and  to  death." 

The  fire  comes  down  from  heaven  to  the 
lonely  righteousness  of  Elijah,  and  he  kills 
four  hundred  of  Baal's  prophets ;  but  we 
see  Stephen  with  the  dying  glory  in  his 
face  under  the  flying  stones.  No  hand 


52  Cbe  Sba&ow  Cbrist 


stops  them.  There  was  another  way.  It 
was  to  let  Paul  catch  the  cross-vision  in 
Stephen's  look  and  bear  away  the  inspira- 
tion that  was  to  save  the  world.  The 
mouths  of  Daniel's  lions  are  opened  in  the 
Coliseum.  The  flames  that  would  not  burn 
Shadrach  break  out  at  the  stakes  of  Christ's 
disciples,  and  Nero's  torches  of  Christians 
flame  the  light  of  our  sweet  and  suffering 
gospel  upon  the  stately  walls  of  Rome. 

The  foxes  have  holes  and  the  birds  of  the  air 
have  nests, 

But  the  Son  of  Man  hath  not  where  to  lay  his 
head. 

The  "Thou  shalt  not "  failed.  The  "Thou 
shalt "  failed.  The  gospel  of  bribery  failed. 
They  were  but  the  gropings  of  the  human 
spirit ;  the  wavering  intimation  of  One  who 
said,  "  I,  if  I  be  lifted  up,  will  draw  all  men 
unto  me." 


X 

•ff  am  tbat  fl  am 

NAAMAN  was  a  foreigner.  He  did  not 
see  any  connection  between  dipping  in  a 
particular  river  seven  times  and  being  cured 
of  leprosy.  He  wondered  why  five  times 
would  not  do  as  well.  Cato  would  have 
thought  the  command  trivial  and  unphil- 
osophic.  Victor  Hugo  would  have  said 
that  Elijah  was  lacking  in  a  sense  of  hu- 
mor, and  Benjamin  Franklin  would  have 
gone  down  to  the  river  and  taken  an  analy- 
sis of  the  water.  But  it  was  different  with 
a  Hebrew.  He  preferred  not  to  know  why 
a  thing  happened.  He  could  not  see  the 
connection  between  the  blowing  of  trum- 
pets and  the  falling  of  the  walls  of  Jericho. 
So  it  impressed  him. 


54  £be  SbaDow  Cbrist 


He  would  have  patronized  a  God  he  could 
understand.  Gideon  was  not  troubled  be- 
cause he  could  not  see  the  logical  relation 
between  lapping  water  with  the  hands  and 
bravery.  Napoleon  would  have  chosen  his 
three  hundred  men  by  studying  them 
closely,  and  Xenophon  would  have  philos- 
ophized that  the  men  who  lapped  with  their 
hands  showed  more  self-control  than  those 
who  greedily  knelt  down  to  drink,  and 
would  therefore  make  the  better  soldiers. 
Gideon  did  as  he  was  told.  He  probably 
would  not  have  done  it  at  all  if  he  had  been 
told  why. 

It  was  when  the  sun  stood  still  that  the 
sons  of  Abraham  and  Isaac  were  breath- 
less in  their  piety  and  overwhelmed  with 
a  sense  of  the  righteousness  of  Jehovah. 
Amiel  stands  under  the  sky  and  worships 
the  Creator  because  the  sun  moves  on,  and 
if  the  sun  were  to  stand  still  at  ten  to-mor- 
row half  the  Christian  world  would  begin 
to  wonder  if  God  existed,  and  the  other 
half  would  for  the  first  time  be  thoroughly 
convinced  he  did,  and  pray  as  they  never 


1  am  tbat  t  am  55 

had  prayed  before.  These  are  two  influ- 
ences toward  deity. 

The  first  Hebrew  to  be  impressed  with 
the  orderliness  of  God  was  Job ;  but  the 
more  thoughtful  the  Jew  became  in  his  re- 
ligion, the  less  hold  the  religion  had  upon 
the  masses.  And  except  with  the  progres- 
sive minority  the  proverb  never  had  the 
force  of  the  command.  If  the  reasons  for 
the  Decalogue  had  been  published  as  an 
appendix,  or  scattered  suggestively  through 
Leviticus  and  Deuteronomy,  it  would  have 
honeycombed  the  Mosaic  law  with  a  pa- 
thetic and  fatal  logicalness.  A  god  giving 
a  reason  would  have  been  plaintive  to  a 
Hebrew.  Even  men  did  not  have  to  give 
reasons  —  except  to  their  superiors. 

They  could  argue  with  the  Voice,  but 
they  did  not  expect  the  Voice  to  argue 
with  them.  Aristotle  would  have  died  un- 
known in  Canaan.  A  command  was  the 
only  syllogism  that  a  Hebrew  understood. 
It  was  because  Moses  never  argued,  per- 
haps, that  the  Lord  selected  him.  Aaron's 
argumentative  gift  furnished  the  reasons 


56  cbc  Sbafcow  Cbutet 

for  a  Golden  Calf.  The  reasoning  people 
are  largely  on  the  wrong  side  in  the  earlier 
revelation.  Pharaoh  made  out  an  excellent 
case  against  Moses.  Moses  had  nothing  to 
say  except  the  ten  plagues.  Elijah  was  not 
a  philosopher.  He  called  down  the  fire 
from  heaven ;  and  there  is  no  finer  scene  in 
Elijah's  life  than  when  he  silently  throws 
his  mantle  upon  Elisha's  shoulders  without 
trying  to  convince  him  of  anything.  No 
one  but  Elijah  could  have  done  it,  and  he 
could  not  have  done  it  except  with  an  Eli- 
sha,  who  was  entitled  to  be  a  prophet  be- 
cause with  one  glance  into  the  splendid, 
silent  face  he  knew  a  man. 

Balaam  was  full  of  reasons.  Jonah  had 
it  all  thought  out  why  he  should  not  go 
to  Nineveh;  but  when  the  Lord's  spirit 
returned  to  him,  and  he  was  preaching  in 
the  streets  of  the  city,  he  told  them  the 
facts.  It  was  later,  when  at  a  safe  and 
righteous  distance  he  was  serenely  waiting 
for  the  city  to  be  destroyed,  that  he  com- 
menced to  argue  again,  and  Jehovah  left 
him.  "  Why  did  not  the  fire  come  down 


f  am  tbat  1  am  57 


from  heaven  ?  "  And  Jonah  soon  found 
himself  in  a  nai've,  prophetic  distress  that 
the  Lord  would  not  sweep  away  forty  thou- 
sand families  in  earthquake  and  lightning, 
to  finish  his  argument  and  prove  that  he 
was  right. 

It  was  an  essentially  matter-of-fact  inspi- 
ration that  held  the  balance  of  power  in 
Hebrew  history — one  which  (outside  of 
the  great  prophets)  explains  every  great 
popular  faith  and  every  great  popular 
movement  from  the  demand  for  a  literal 
king  to  the  cross  of  the  figurative  One. 
The  national  inspiration  came  from  the 
blending  of  two  facts.  One  was  a  com- 
mand, and  the  other  a  miracle. 

Right  was  right  because  God  commanded 
it.  He  did  not  command  it  because  it  was 
right,  and  the  Hebrew  felt  bound  to  a  thou- 
sand duties  because  of  the  orthodox  mir- 
acle he  always  required  to  help  him  do 
them.  The  obedience  that  came  in  the 
gospel  because  the  reasons  of  heaven  are 
shared  with  us,  was  demanded  in  Leviticus 
because  the  reasons  were  not  shared ;  and 


58  cbe  sba&ow  Gbrist 


the  miracle,  which  is  a  glorified  lack  of  rea- 
son, was  the  far-off  deprecating  secret  sym- 
bol with  which  the  hiding  human  heart  ap- 
proached its  open  God.  The  great  sharing 
ideal  had  not  been  reached.  It  was  a  slave's 
religion.  The  moral  philosophy  of  the  He- 
brew was  the  Lord's  convenience,  and  the 
lash  of  the  Egyptian  followed  his  worship 
for  a  thousand  years. 

In  its  first  conception  being  a  god  is  be- 
ing subject  to  oneself,  and,  with  all  his  the- 
ocratic traditions,  the  king  was  guiltily 
nearer  to  the  Hebrew  heart  than  the  pro- 
phet, because  a  prophet  was  subject  to  a 
God  and  a  king  was  a  god —  having  at  least 
the  divinity  of  doing  as  he  pleased,  except 
when  an  unseen  power  interfered.  Ahab 
was  the  logical  outcome  of  the  Decalogue. 
With  the  idea  that  righteousness  consisted 
in  not  having  one's  will,  the  stronger  a 
man  was  the  more  right  he  had  to  do 
wrong  and  the  more  inevitable  it  was  that 
the  king  should  be  the  most  wicked  man  in 
Israel.  Disobedience  was  but  dealing  with 
the  Commandments  in  the  same  spirit  with 


f  am  tbat  f  am  59 


which  they  had  been  written  —  a  fulfilment 
of  a  choice — an  ethical  conception  on  which 
one  does  right  for  the  same  reason  that  he 
does  wrong  —  because  there  is  something 
stronger  than  he  is  —  the  very  brutality  of 
morals,  the  religious  form  of  cowardice. 

In  all  the  most  simple  concerns  of  faith 
and  conduct,  unquestioning  obedience  is 
but  a  higher  form  of  unquestioning  diso- 
bedience, still  maintaining  the  rudimentary 
and  barbaric  emphasis  of  force.  Elijah's 
argument  was  not  with  the  nature  of  his 
hearers  nor  with  the  nature  of  God,  and 
the  four  hundred  dead  prophets  with 
which  he  brought  his  mighty  service  to 
a  close  were  but  the  inevitable  outcome 
of  the  doctrine  he  had  been  preaching. 
The  children  of  Israel  went  to  and  fro  on 
the  scene  of  slaughter,  looking  logically 
down  into  dead  faces  for  the  proofs  of  the 
righteousness  of  God.  The  bears  that 
devoured  the  mockers  of  Elisha  but  put 
into  bear  language  the  essential  elements 
of  Elisha's  ethics.  The  leprosy  of  Gehazi 
was  the  argument  for  the  tenth  com- 


60  Gbe  SbaOow  Gbrtet 


mandment.  The  sinfulness  of  adultery 
was  proved  by  the  throwing  of  stones, 
and  the  unrighteousness  of  murder  was 
established  beyond  all  dispute  by  another 
murder. 

A  law  which  found  its  first  appeal  in  not 
giving  any  reasons  could  only  be  reason- 
ably enforced  by  not  giving  any  more  rea- 
sons. The  theory  of  ethics  that  was  based 
on  a  will  could  only  be  carried  out  by  force. 
It  was  the  time  of  the  unsharing  One  — 
the  One  who  was  God  on  Mount  Sinai  be- 
cause he  would  not  give  an  account  of 
Himself,  and  God  on  the  Cross  because 
He  would. 

The  life  of  the  Messiah  was  not  a  denial 
of  reason,  but  a  definition  of  it,  being  from 
the  first  an  exaltation  both  of  its  sinceri- 
ties and  possibilities,  and  always  of  its  dig- 
nity. Intuitive  rather  than  dialectic  in  his 
methods,  it  was  the  very  nature  of  his 
commands  that  they  were  insights  and 
demanded  insights — the  seeing  of  reasons 
—  to  keep  them.  "  I  am  the  light  of  the 
world."  The  unquestioning  obedience  that 


I  am  tbat  f  am  6r 


Moses  demanded  became  in  the  Christ  the 
great  sharing  ideal  of  men  —  the  obedi- 
ence which  questions,  and  then  commands 
itself. 

The  word  Why  is  one  of  the  keynote 
words  running  through  His  influence  on 
the  earth  —  a  word  around  which  he  gath- 
ered all  the  tragedy  and  love  and  sor- 
row and  faith  and  hope  that  made  him  the 
Great  Experience  of  the  world.  In  all  his 
exasperating  interviews  with  ignorant  men, 
used  as  it  was  from  the  beginning  to  the 
end  for  cunning  and  cruelty  and  scoffs  and 
crosses,  one  of  the  great  fundamental  forms 
of  growth  which  He  informed  forever  with 
the  inspiration  of  His  life  was  the  ques- 
tion mark.  The  divinest  word  in  the  hu- 
man heart  except  Yes,  and  the  only  way 
to  Yes, —  this  Why  that  followed  Jesus — 
a  word  the  limitations  of  which  can  only 
be  known  by  using  it,  and  the  inspiration 
of  which  is  living  in  the  Mind  of  God. 
Perfect  obedience  can  only  be  the  sharing 
of  a  command,  and  through  the  freedom 
of  many  a  brave  and  struggling  question 


62  abe  Sba&ow  Cbrist 


entering  at  last  into  that  divine  life  which 
belongs  to  us  and  to  which  we  belong  — 
the  divinity  of  which  is  that  it  commands 
its  own  obedience  and  obeys  its  own  com- 
mands. 

"  They  shall  say  unto  me,  '  What  is  His 
name  ? ' "  "  And  God  said  unto  Moses, '  I  AM 
THAT  I  AM.' "  A  non-committal  di- 
vinity allowed  but  a  non-committal  Deca- 
logue. It  was  but  the  time  of  intimation. 
Jesus  was  the  frankness  of  God. 


XI 

(Bentleness  1bas  jflDafce  /iDe  6reat 


A  PROPHET  is  one  who  infers.  He  abides 
in  the  divine  symbols  that  concentrate 
life.  He  is  spiritual,  because  instead  of 
needing  a  thousand  facts  for  one  faith, 
he  gathers  from  every  fact  faiths  that  are 
thousandfold.  The  unknown  wraps  its 
spirit  about  every  knowledge,  and  every 
experience  is  the  symbol  of  what  he  knows 
without  experience.  The  souls  of  events 
commune  with  him  before  they  are  born 
upon  the  earth.  In  the  passion  of  his 
thought  walk  the  centuries  which  hour  by 
hour  and  day  by  day  his  brothers  shall 
live  bitterly  through  to  know.  His  spirit 
comes,  a  figure  of  speech.  To  understand 
him  is  to  be  a  nation  in  one's  heart.  He 
is  the  metaphor  of  a  thousand  years. 


64  Cbc  SbaDow  Cbrtst 


The  world's  dullness  is  its  literalness. 
We  know  the  earth  by  surveys  and  the 
sky  we  have  learned  with  figures,  but  the 
prophecies  that  God  would  sing  to  us — 
one  by  one  we  grimly  pace  them  off.  They 
are  trodden  in  sorrow  into  the  creeds  of 
men.  Our  religion  has  been  seeing  after- 
ward. The  only  prophet  we  fear  is  His- 
tory— the  Brute  of  Truth — too  actual  to 
argue  with,  too  safe  in  the  past  to  crucify. 

Moses  was  solitary  because  he  looked 
forward  and  David  a  minstrel  of  the  peo- 
ple because  he  sang  five  hundred  years 
of  facts.  In  the  naked  might  of  personal- 
ity, out  of  oblivion  itself  a  prophecy  can 
come  forth,  but  hundreds  of  years  must 
visit  the  heart  for  a  psalm.  It  took  a  great 
many  graves  for  David  to  sing,  and  the 
wine  of  countless  lives,  crushed  in  sorrow 
and  sparkling  with  gladness,  drop  by  drop, 
to  make  songs  like  these. 

The  people  had  lived.  So  they  could 
sing.  Decalogues  may  be  drawn  down 
from  a  cloud  and  delivered  on  stones  in  a 
day,  but  songs  are  not  made  while  a  bush  is 


Gentleness  1bas  jffia&e  fl&e  Great   65 


burning,  or  conceived  of  smoke  and  thun- 
der while  the  people  wait.  With  great 
slow  chords  they  come — tremulous  out  of 
the  past  —  with  shadow  choruses  they 
come,  with  dead  hands  to  touch  the  strings 
and  old  souls  for  melodies.  To  prophesy 
is  to  anticipate  a  new  experience ;  to  sing 
is  to  bring  back  the  soul  of  old  ones.  God 
has  two  prophets  for  every  truth  :  Moses 
gives  the  law ;  David  sings  its  life. 

The  inspirations  that  have  been  founded 
in  the  beginning  upon  a  solitary  soul  obey- 
ing a  mountain  must  be  founded  now  upon 
the  experience  of  a  nation  with  itself.  It 
was  a  literal  nation.  It  could  not  take  its 
songs  in  advance.  Its  overtures  are  all 
solos.  Note  by  note,  life  by  life,  Song  is 
taught  them.  David's  is  an  after-song. 
So  it  is  a  chorus.  He  sings  facts. 

But  the  experience  of  the  nation  is  the 
accompaniment,  the  innumerable  under- 
tone, to  which  David  sings,  rather  than  the 
song  itself.  It  affords  him  the  choral  ef- 
fects, those  mighty  antiphonals  between 
the  soul  of  a  poet  and  the  voices  of  his  age 


66  abe  Sba&ow  Cbrist 


and  people,  which  alone  can  make  the 
song  of  his  life  an  immortal  necessity  with 
men  —  a  multitudinous  truth.  But  as  with 
all  great  singers,  the  greatest  fact,  the 
greatest  experience  to  David,  is  himself. 

To  be  a  great  man  is  to  be  greater  than 
a  people,  and  to  be  a  great  singer  is  more 
than  to  sum  up  a  nation  in  a  rhapsody  or 
write  down  its  heart  in  a  hymnal.  It  is  to 
sing  more  than  the  nation  sings. 

Truth  calls  to  every  poet:  "Thou  shalt 
come  with  me.  Through  shadow  and  sun 
I  will  lead  thee ;  with  dreams  I  write  upon 
thy  face,  and  into  thy  heart  I  pour  forever 
the  Melody  that  dwells  with  me.  It  shall  be 
thou."  With  the  tyranny  of  truth  the  poet 
goes  forth,  and  Life,  Life,  like  the  hand  of 
God,  sweeps  across  the  spirit  that  he  calls  his 
own,  and  strokes  from  out  the  strings  the 
strange,  unwilling  songs  that  sleep  within. 
Melody  will  not  let  him  go.  "  Yea,  though 
thou  art  broken,  O  poet,  and  in  the  silence 
and  the  dark  thou  wouldst  lie,  thou  shalt 
sing !  The  day  shall  smite  thy  chords. 
In  the  night  shall  beautiful  truth  break  in 


Gentleness  1>as  dfcaDe  Ac  Great   67 


upon  thy  rest."  Leading  by  being  led, 
ordained  from  the  beginning  of  the  world  to 
be  greater  than  himself,  with  irrevocable 
beauty  each  new-born  song  locks  the 
poet's  old  self  away.  If  he  be  a  singer, 
song  shall  sing  him  into  a  great  poet.  If 
he  be  a  great  poet,  song  shall  sing  him  into 
a  prophet  —  or  silence  shall  be  his  —  or 
the  muffled  way  where  great  songs  cease, 
and  the  great  but  broken  voices  are  led  to 
the  forgetting-place  of  men. 

It  came  to  David  to  be  greater  than 
himself.  And  to  him  who  is  greater  than 
himself  is  God  God.  Not  on  Mount  Sinai, 
nor  in  the  biography  of  Moses,  nor  in  a 
book,  nor  in  a  temple,  but  in  himself, 
David  worshiped.  So  he  was  a  singer. 
So  he  was  a  prophet;  and  the  greatest 
event  that  had  taken  place  in  Hebrew  his- 
tory was  the  heart  of  a  shepherd  lad  —  a 
heart  which  was  a  continual  discovery  to 
itself,  from  the  psalms  the  sheep  knew  in 
the  night  dews  to  those  the  people  chanted 
when  the  king  was  dead,  and  the  singer 
was  borne  to  silence.  Through  a  supreme 


68  Gbe  SbaOow  Cbrtst 


achievement  with  himself — a  penitent, 
beautiful  self-respect  —  a  self-assertion  as 
sweet  as  the  trust  of  a  child,  there  came 
to  pass  in  David  the  first  great  revolution 
in  the  Old  Testament.  The  God  who  is 
a  Speaker  in  the  Pentateuch  is  the  Listener 
in  the  Psalms.  The  law  of  the  gospel  — 
"  The  Lord  said  unto  Moses."  The  gos- 
pel of  the  law — the  first  of  the  Bethlehem 
shepherds  singing  on  the  hills  a  thousand 
years  away  with  the  daring  of  love.  "  Bow 
down  Thine  ear,  O  Lord,  and  hear  me,  for 
I  am  poor  and  needy,  yet  the  Lord  think- 
eth  upon  me.  Make  no  tarrying,  O  my 
God." 

It  would  seem  as  if  being  a  Moses  were 
one  of  the  helpless  instincts  of  life  —  the 
"  Thus  saith  the  Lord."  But  David's  ask- 
ing the  Creator  to  listen  to  his  thoughts 
is  the  mightiest  acquirement  of  the  He- 
brew spirit,  and  forever  marks  with  the  soul 
of  the  psalmist  the  most  difficult  crisis  in 
the  approach  to  God. 

The  prophecy  of  Isaiah  was  supremely 
logical,  and  had  that  inspiration  of  inevita- 


Gentleness  1>a8  /fta&e  fl&e  Great  69 


bleness  which  the  Great  Spirit  is  wont  to 
give  to  utterance.  The  coming  of  Jesus  was 
the  unfolding  of  the  only  possible  plan. 
His  dying  on  the  cross  was  the  very  axiom 
of  his  being  among  men  at  all.  His  resur- 
rection was  as  unavoidable  as  his  life,  and 
for  a  Church  not  to  have  followed  His  mes- 
sage is  as  unthinkable  as  the  discourage- 
ment of  God. 

But  all  these  have  been  the  unfoldings, 
the  refinements,  the  inevitable  beliefs  that 
came  from  this  first  victorious  belief  of  Da- 
vid's, when,  thousands  of  years  ago,  with  no 
great  ages  to  tell  him  the  way,  with  the 
God  of  Sinai  he  walked  the  hills  at  night 
and  dared  to  tell  Him  all  his  heart. 

With  an  artlessness  that  makes  him 
man's  immortal  child,  with  the  Awful  One 
of  the  clouded  mountain  —  the  Thunder 
One  of  Moses  —  wandering  with  his  hand 
in  His  hand,  prattling  of  his  tiny  life  to  the 
Creator  of  the  ends  of  the  earth  —  to  Da- 
vid, little  one  of  God,  great  among  men,  was 
the  mightiest,  loneliest  deadlift  of  faith,  in 
the  conquering  of  the  heavens  for  the  earth. 


70  ttbe  Sba&ow  Cbrist 


Belonging  to  a  people  who  had  assumed 
that  what  made  authority  authority  at  all 
was  its  being  outside  of  themselves ;  taught 
to  look  out,  David  dared  to  look  in,  and  He 
who  had  appealed  to  men  because  He  was 
a  Pillar  of  Fire,  appealed  to  David  because 
he  was  in  himself. 

The  crisis  which  comes  to  every  religion 
and  to  all  art  came  in  Hebrew  history 
with  this  first  great  poet.  The  eternal 
issue  faced  the  shepherd  boy  —  the  one 
that  has  faced  every  singer  and  every 
prophet  since.  It  came  to  him  either  to 
found  his  faith  upon  his  experience  or 
upon  his  inexperience.  Either  to  base  his 
inspiration  upon  not  being  inspired  himself, 
and  fight  for  the  experience  of  Moses  with 
an  inspiration  of  not  believing  in  his  own, 
or  to  trust  himself  as  a  man's  only  rever- 
ent way  of  trusting  God,  and  to  serve 
Moses  by  being  a  prophet  too. 

David  looked  in.  He  lived  within.  He 
sang  his  life.  Not  a  minor  poet  or  a  sub- 
Mosaic  prophet,  but,  like  Isaiah  and  Job  and 
Jesus,  giving  to  the  world,  he  gave  himself. 


Gentleness  Das  flfcaDe  Abe  Great   71 


One  of  the  great  self-assertions  of  history, 
the  first  radiant,  humble  GOD  AND  I — 
the  egoism  of  a  shepherd  boy  becomes  the 
ritual  of  the  human  heart  and  the  dignity 
of  a  listening  God  is  conferred  upon  the 
children  of  men. 


XII 

Steep  Galletb  THnto  Deep 

WHILE  it  is  the  power  of  the  egoist  that 
he  reveals  his  life,  he  reveals  no  more  than 
his  life.  David  was  not  Solomon  or  Isaiah 
or  Job,  and  he  shared  God's  will  more  than 
his  mind.  The  old  boy-prayers  —  the  out- 
door ones  —  with  the  night  wind  in  them, 
and  the  sleep  of  lambs,  and  the  awe  of  the 
sky,  and  the  nestling  communion  of  a  child, 
he  never  outgrew.  Even  through  the 
sturdier  ones,  to  be  sung  with  the  clash  of 
shields  and  the  voices  of  armies,  there  is 
something  that  steals  from  these  —  David 
is  always  a  shepherd  boy  when  he  prays. 
With  the  child-beauty  he  stamps  forever 
the  relation  of  man  to  God.  He  stands 
forth  in  the  wise,  unhappy  world  with  a 


S>eep  Calletb  Tflnto  Deep  73 


philosophic  innocence  that  has  never  be- 
longed to  so  great  a  man  before  or  since. 

But  he  lived — this  shepherd  boy;  a 
beautiful,  revealing,  singing  thing  —  to 
live.  He  could  not  but  spiritualize  the 
law.  Spiritualizing  is  experiencing,  and 
thus  came  to  pass  that  supreme  crisis  of 
the  truth — the  letter  blossoming  into  the 
spirit — the  law,  objective  in  Moses,  sub- 
jective in  David  —  the  mightier  form  of 
inspiration,  the  noble  necessity  of  song, 
the  heart  of  a  shepherd,  the  expression  of 
a  world. 

And  indeed,  whatever  the  self  may  be, 
self- revelation  from  the  One  in  the  heavens 
to  the  singers  on  the  earth  and  the  men 
who  live  the  songs,  is  the  creative  prin- 
ciple of  history.  Genius  is  the  convic- 
tion of  ingenuousness.  Prophecy  the  con- 
viction that  heaven  listens  and  the  earth 
waits  —  the  helpless  destiny  of  utterance. 
The  world  is  not  divided  into  singers  and 
listeners.  Because  he  could  not  keep  still 
about  himself,  David  became  the  oppor- 
tunity of  God.  His  prayers  are  not  cata- 


74  Gbe  Sbafrow  Cbrist 


logues  of  desire,  and  there  is  more  infor- 
mation than  petition  in  this  communion  of 
the  shepherd  with  The  Shepherd. 

In  the  jealous,  watchful  silence  with 
which  men  often  walk  the  revelations  of 
the  world  and  hide  their  hearts  to  listen, 
past  a  thousand  beautiful  doors  are  they 
doomed  to  go  that  would  be  opened  if  they 
opened  theirs.  Though  the  souls  that  go 
to  and  fro  before  Him  can  never  hide  a 
thought,  He  listens,  not  because  He  needs 
to  listen,  but  because  it  is  divine  to  hear  His 
children  speak ;  and  when  David  tells  his 
Maker  the  quaint  human  thoughts  that  fill 
our  little  living  here,  the  prayer  is  not  for 
the  prayer.  It  is  not  for  God,  but  for 
the  beautiful  returns  he  sends  to  open 
places.  When  the  heart  has  been  emptied 
He  comes.  Only  the  singer  listens.  The 
self-expression  of  man  is  the  self- revelation 
of  God.  The  Incarnation  —  older  than 
Jesus  —  is  a  habit  from  the  beginning  of 
the  world.  He  has  come  to  His  sons  not 
by  hiding  the  human,  but  by  calling  the 
human  forth  and  shining  through  it. 


Deep  Calletb  TUnto  5>eep  75 


It  is  night.  Following  silence  and 
shadow  and  sleep  into  the  camp,  David 
listens  to  the  breathing  of  Saul  —  the 
breath  of  hate  when  it  wakes,  of  murder 
and  pursuit,  a  shout  across  the  battle  — 
as  innocent  now  as  the  lambs  asleep  in  his 
father's  flocks.  Destinies  come  and  go 
across  David's  face  —  and  psalms. 

One  blow  for  a  hundred  wars  ? 

He  hears  the  old  brooks  in  the  hills. 
"  Thy  gentleness  hath  made  me  great." 
Standing  over  Saul  to  long  for  him,  David 
saw  God  in  himself,  and  when  the  waking 
came  Saul  knew  at  last  that  David  must 
be  king,  because  he  had  a  king's  heart. 

The  king  in  the  gate,  peering  across  the 
plain — Absalom  righting  for  the  throne — 
the  messengers  running  —  a  question — a 
complete  theology.  "  Is  the  young  man 
Absalom  safe  ?  " 

Once  he  lay  with  his  head  on  his  arm — 
this  shepherd  boy, —  and  he  watched  the 
wandering  flocks  trooping  above  his  sheep. 
"  He  would  be  a  king ;  he  would  have 
princes  for  his  sons." 


Gbe  SbaDow  Gbrtst 


He  had  not  thought  of  this. 

Through  the  heart- aches  of  a  thousand 
years  the  Father-cry — the  father-cry,  "O 
my  son  Absalom,  my  son,  my  son  Ab- 
salom !  Would  God  I  had  died  for  thee. 
O  Absalom,  my  son,  my  son  !  " 

The  king's  cry  in  the  gate.  The  hailing 
of  the  Cross.  The  Fatherhood  of  God. 


XIII 

Mbo  6fx>etb  Songs  in  tbe  IFUgbt 

* 

ONE  would  know  that  David  must  have 
lain  awake  with  these  songs  of  his.  The 
beautiful  broken  sleep  of  a  Hebrew  king 
floats  down  its  music,  and  for  thousands  of 
years  we  sing,  because  David  shared  the 
shadow  of  the  sun  with  the  shining  ones, 
and  in  their  wakefulness  remembered  not 
his  rest. 

O  listening  Night,  when  the  children  of 
mothers  are  born,  and  the  children  of  the 
sky  come  forth,  and  the  songs  of  the  heart, 
and  the  Morning  makes  ready  for  Joy. 

O  watching  Night,  when  souls  are  un- 
locked with  the  dark  and  Silence  sojourns 
with  men,  when  the  wind  goes  forth  a 
muffled  footstep  of  the  day,  and  Sleep  — 
from  down  his  eternal  ways  —  Sleep  has 

77 


78  ftbe  SbaDow  Cbrist 


come  to  us,  and  Dream  —  the  walking  of 
God  through  sleep ! 

O  Eternal  Night,  O  Infinite  Face,  bend 
low.  The  sun  has  wandered  down  the 
west  The  tiny  day  has  gone.  Say  thou 
again  "  Thou  belongest  unto  Me !  I  am 
Death.  I  am  Life.  I  am  God.  Thou 
belongest  unto  Me  !  " 

O  Infinite  Face,  with  the  shadow  I  know 
not  of  and  the  light  I  cannot  know,  with 
the  shadow  I  know,  I  come,  with  the 
shadow  of  earth  I  come,  with  David's 
prayer  I  come.  "Bow  down  Thine  ear, 
O  Lord,  for  I  am  poor  and  needy,  yet 
Thou  thinkest  upon  me.  Make  no  tar- 
rying, O  my  God." 

No  one  would  care  what  David  did  after 
reading  these  psalms.  Hamlet  saw  the 
king  praying.  If  he  had  heard  him,  he 
would  have  forgiven  him.  Shakspere  knew 
the  manner  of  men  too  well  to  let  the  pen- 
itent words  be  known.  It  would  make  a 
god  a  God  to  listen  one  day  to  the  world, 
and  a  man  could  hardly  overhear  the  hu- 
man heart  for  a  thousand  years  without  a 


<3fvetb  Songs  in  tbe  Bigbt       79 

divine  love  in  him.  It  has  been  wondered 
that  God  could  come  down  to  the  earth. 
He  could  not  help  coming.  There  was  a 
cross  because  he  had  listened  to  David's 
prayers. 

It  is  insolent  to  wonder  that  he  loves  us. 
Any  one  would  be  a  god  who  knew  what 
a  god  knows.  The  one  attribute  of  God  is 
omniscience,  and  his  virtues  are  the  neces- 
sities of  His  knowledge.  Rising  into  peni- 
tence, forgiveness,  and  peace,  with  no 
cross  to  make  him  bold,  even  David  could 
chant  in  the  night  watches,  "  He  delivered 
me  because  he  delighted  in  me,"  and  "  I 
was  shapen  in  iniquity  and  in  sin  did  my 
mother  conceive  me."  The  transfiguration 
of  Moses  which  the  disciples  thought  they 
saw  had  happened  a  thousand  years  be- 
fore. It  was  the  Singer  in  the  night. 

The  psalms  are  the  real  revelation  of  the 
Decalogue.  What  Moses  stated,  David 
sang.  Commands  had  become  prayers. 
It  was  the  limitation  of  Moses  that  he  sang 
but  twice,  that  his  song  was  separated  from 
everything  else.  "  I  will  sing  unto  the 


8o  £be  Sba&ow  Cbriet 


Lord,  for  He  hath  triumphed  gloriously." 
The  Ten  Commandments  were  delivered  to 
a  silent  people  by  a  silent  man.  Miriam's 
song  was  not  there.  There  were  no  re- 
sponses. The  voices  of  men  sang  not 
back  to  God  at  the  foot  of  Sinai.  Singing 
had  been  confined  to  the  Red  Sea,  but 
the  Red  Sea  song,  broken  loose  in  David, 
sweeps  the  worship  of  Israel  in  his  "  Praise 
ye  the  Lord  "  to  the  very  foot  of  the  Com- 
mandment mountain,  and  the  laws  of  Mo- 
ses are  choruses  at  last,  on  the  lips  of  the 
congregation.  The  inside  of  the  Ten  Com- 
mandments came  with  one  who  saw  them 
from  the  inside.  David  was  the  discoverer 
of  the  law's  heart.  His  way  of  conceiving 
duty  was  praise.  His  method  of  doing  it 
was  communion.  He  has  not  a  song  that 
does  not  pray,  or  a  prayer  that  does 
not  sing.  This  was  a  new  thing  in  the 
world.  It  was  a  poet's  inevitable  inter- 
pretation of  command,  gained  as  a  poet 
must  ever  gain  his  interpretation,  through 
life  itself.  He  sang  his  experience  of  The 
Will.  It  was  "Thy  gentleness  has  made 
me  great." 


Wlbo  <3ivetb  Songs  fn  tbe  IFiiQbt       81 


Jesus  was  the  Redeemer  of  the  Old 
Testament.  He  saved  it  for  us.  David  was 
the  redeemer  of  Moses.  The  nobler  sense 
of  relatedness,  which  is  the  essence  of  the 
poetic  temperament,  gave  to  the  world  in 
him  two  mighty  moods  that  never  had 
been  blended  before.  Saul  loved  to  listen 
because  it  was  king's  music.  The  same 
fingers  that  found  the  gentle  reveries  of 
the  immortal  harp  held  up  the  head  of 
Goliath  before  the  shouts  of  soldiers. 

Before  the  darkness  of  a  dream  —  beau- 
tiful dips  of  the  harp  which  seem  to  glide 
down  and  down  and  down  into  the  old, 
old  melody  that  deep  below  life  God  keeps 
for  the  nearer  ones  —  the  melody  that 
seems  to  sing  about  music  that  it  came  from 
— not  yet  for  us.  Achilles  is  Homer. 

Along  the  streets  the  women  singing 
and  dancing  with  tabrets,  with  joy  and  with 
instruments  of  music,  Homer  is  his  own 
Achilles. 

An  inspiration  of  paradox  —  a  soul 
which  is  the  most  intimate  revelation  be- 
tween the  "I  AM"  and  "He  that  hath 
seen  Me  hath  seen  the  Father."  With 


82  Gbe  SbaDow  Cbrfgt 


"sons  of  Abraham,"  "sons  of  Isaac,"  "sons 
of  Jacob,"  children  of  Israel,  there  is  one 
name  folded  away  with  the  pillar  of  cloud. 
There  should  never  be  the  title  "The  son 
of  Moses."  Though  with  a  David-place  in 
his  heart,  it  was  not  for  his  people  to  know. 
The  name  of  God  should  be  "The  Son  of 
David." 

While  it  was  somewhat  to  be  Homer 
and  Achilles,  both  at  once,  it  was  the  great- 
ness of  the  psalmist  that  he  made  men  love 
him.  He  was  the  Old  Testament  atone- 
ment—  this  warrior  minstrel  —  this  king- 
poet,  the  singer  of  command,  writing  the 
Pentateuch  over  into  hymns,  saying  his 
prayers  with  the  Ten  Commandments. 


XIV 

tbe  people  Saw  tbe  flDountafn 
Smofcfng  TTbeg  Stoofc  Bfar  ©ff 

THE  second  commandment  was  against 
idols,  and  the  only  alternative  for  the  He- 
brew was  to  make  an  idol  of  the  thick  dark- 
ness from  which  the  commandment  was 
issued.  This  is  what  he  did.  The  smoke- 
god  was  the  ghost  of  idol  worship.  The 
Voice  was  in  the  darkness,  and  it  was  care- 
fully called  the  sign  of  God's  presence,  and 
not  God  himself.  But  when  the  average 
Hebrew  looked  up  from  his  manna-gather- 
ing to  the  pillar  in  the  sky,  it  was  God.  It 
was  exactly  God. 

The  cloud  was  the  first  clumsy  and  yet 
beautiful  groping  of  the  human  heart  to- 
ward infinity.  It  was  a  mystery  idol, 
carved  by  the  soft  airs  of  heaven.  There 


84  Cbe  SbaDow  Cbrtet 


were  no  poor  trivial  human  outlines.  It 
was  the  idol  of  the  Breath  of  God,  half  of 
heaven  and  half  of  the  earth,  floating  over 
the  lives  of  men  like  a  thought.  Always 
to  be  glorious  because  it  first  caught  God 
away  from  the  stone-loving,  material  ways 
of  the  human  heart,  a  cloud  is  yet  but  a 
cloud,  a  poor  tiny  wraith  of  infinity,  tucked 
over  a  little  mountain  way,  down  under  the 
worlds,  on  a  little  earth.  The  worlds  shone 
on  unrecognized. 

The  essential  thing  about  the  pillar  of 
fire  was  its  nearness.  It  protected  the 
Hebrews  from  the  lonely  stars,  from  the 
infinity  of  their  God.  Children  crying  in 
the  dark,  Jehovah  kept  a  dim  light  burn- 
ing over  them  to  show  that  he  was  there. 
They  did  not  know  that  the  night  was  God. 

Arid  yet  the  very  fear  of  Jehovah  had 
a  certain  familiarity  in  it,  the  sense  of  a  right 
to  constant  attention,  to  striking  miracles. 
There  is  an  impression  of  a  certain  haughty 
intimacy,  a  divine  neighborliness  on  the 
part  of  the  One  of  Sinai  that  no  amount  of 
thunder  and  lightning  and  darkness  and 


I 

Idben  tbe  people  Saw  tbe  /iBountatn   85 

terror  can  quite  remove  from  the  early  He- 
brew thought.  An  air  of  close  and  mu- 
tual watchfulness  —  at  once  the  source  of 
the  moral  energy  and  the  philosophical 
childishness  of  the  Hebrew  —  runs  through 
all  the  earlier  chapters  of  the  Bible,  as  if 
Jehovah  were  experimenting  with  the  hu- 
man nature  he  had  made,  and  men  were 
experimenting  with  him. 

There  is  a  freshness  of  atmosphere  as  if 
nothing  had  ever  been  done  before,  as  if 
the  responsibility  of  sinning  the  first  fresh 
sins  in  all  the  world  came  then,  with  the 
glow  and  zest  not  left  to  us,  in  these  later 
days,  when  the  iron  monotony  of  evil  has 
pressed  down  its  awful  commonplace  upon 
the  human  heart,  and  we  sin  too  wisely  to 
sin  well  —  too  thoughtfully,  with  a  haunt- 
4ng  of  an  inherited  sadness  and  all  the  in- 
convenient convictions  that  reflect  the  ex- 
perience of  men. 

Living  when  all  the  sins  of  which  we  can 
think  have  been  used  over  and  over  again  — 
when  original  sin  is  called  original  because 
it  is  not  —  we  look  back  in  the  earlier 


86  Cbe  Sbafcow  Gbrtet 


Scriptures  to  a  time  when  the  originality 
of  a  sin  was  the  most  fascinating  part  of  it. 
The  activity  of  Jehovah  in  the  Penta- 
teuch, the  bustle  of  morality  called  forth 
by  this  creative  period  of  immorality,  is 
noticeably  lessened  when  the  sin  of  Israel 
has  become  a  mere  inheritance  in  the  land 
of  Canaan  and  the  uniqueness  of  disobedi- 
ence has  lost  its  bloom.  God  and  man 
are  connected  in  every  verse.  Everything 
is  either  right  or  wrong.  Every  word 
moralizes.  In  Chronicles,  and  through  the 
bad  Kings,  revelation  grows  aloof,  and 
the  emphasis  of  prophecy  is  changed  to 
the  story  of  events,  as  if  Jehovah  were  let- 
ting men  wander  as  they  would  —  weary 
of  history,  waiting  for  something  worth 
while,  or  a  man  to  be  born  like  David  who 
would  call  out  His  waiting  love  and  turn 
Him  toward  men  again  —  for  their  beauti- 
ful dreams  of  what  they  would  be  if  they 
could.  There  was  a  time  of  divine  retreat 
when  the  soul  of  the  fathers  worshiping 
their  less  familiar  God  drew  closer  to  Him 
in  the  silence.  He  had  been  jealous  before 


TPQlben  tbe  people  Saw  tbe  fountain   87 

Restive  —  He  had  seemed  to  change  His 
mind,  to  lose  His  patience  —  a  new  God 
only  beginning  to  learn  how  discouraging 
people  were.  Through  all  these  cruder 
days  the  conception  which  emphasized  His 
nearness  belittled  it,  and  He  seems  to  have 
taken  the  opportunity — Infinite  God — In- 
cognito—  to  disguise  Himself  for  the  lit- 
tle awe  of  men  in  the  tawdry  passions  that 
they  had  themselves,  before  they  knew  who 
He  was. 

The  metaphor  of  a  profound  philosophy 
to  us,  Genesis  was  not  a  metaphor  to  the 
Hebrew,  and  this  barbaric  literalness  of 
God's  being  almost  in  the  next  room  was 
the  token  both  of  inspiration  and  limitation. 
The  Hebrew  revelation  was  inspired  enough 
to  begin  at  the  beginning  of  the  mind  as 
well  as  the  beginning  of  the  world;  and 
although  it  has  been  a  supposed  duty  to 
maintain  a  special  private  psychology  for 
the  Bible  —  to  believe  that  it  could  not 
have  been  inspired  unless  it  commenced  in 
the  middle,  or  commenced  at  both  ends,  or 
did  not  commence  at  all, —  the  idea  of 


88  Gbe  SbaDow  Cbrist 

truth  looking  down  on  itself  as  it  winds 
high  and  higher  through  its  pages,  has 
gained  momentum  enough  to  make  us  dis- 
tinctly worship  God  for  what  the  children 
in  the  wilderness  did  not  see. 

They  did  not  see  infinity.  The  God  of 
their  duties  was  not  the  Infinite  God. 
Though  the  Book  of  Job  may  have  been  a 
poem  before  the  death  of  Moses,  it  was 
certainly  not  history  until  after  David.  Full 
of  the  trivial-terrible,  Jehovah  was  a  more 
earnest  play-god  in  the  groping  childhood 
of  the  human  spirit. 

Before  the  telescope  and  the  Sermon  on 
the  Mount,  the  compass  and  the  thirteenth 
of  Corinthians  had  wrought  their  vast  and 
mutual  prophecy ;  before  Paul  and  Luther 
and  Galileo  and  Columbus  and — Jesus, 
had  unfolded  the  works  and  the  thoughts 
of  God;  under  the  serene  satire  of  the 
heavens  in  the  little  land  of  Uz,  "Where 
wast  thou  when  I  laid  the  foundations  of 
the  earth," — Job  became  the  discoverer 
of  infinity. 


XV 

"  Wbere  TKHast  ftbou  OTben  fl  Xaio  tbe 
foundations  of  tbe  Eartb?" 

BUT  Job  was  more  than  the  discoverer  of 
infinity.  He  was  the  first  to  see  the  bear- 
ing of  infinity  on  righteousness.  He  was 
the  Moses  of  the  sky  and  the  earth  and 
the  sea.  He  connected  the  Ten  Com- 
mandments with  the  universe.  He  did  for 
the  first  chapter  of  Genesis  what  David  did 
for  the  twentieth  chapter  of  Exodus.  He 
set  it  to  music.  He  made  it  an  incentive 
to  action. 

The  imagination  of  Job  was  the  science 
of  his  day.  He  turned  men  to  God  through 
the  natural  world.  It  was  the  return  of 
religion  to  nature,  the  renaissance  of  crea- 
tion. His  heart  had  the  further  listening 
in  it.  He  heard  the  voice  beyond  the  Sinai 

89 


90  Gbe  Sbatow  Cbrist 


voice  —  the  Voice  of  the  voice  —  when 
darkness  was  upon  the  face  of  the  deep, 
and  God  out  of  the  infinite  shadow  moved 
forth  over  the  chaos  of  the  earth,  and  the 
young  thunders  called  across  the  new  seas, 
and  the  "  morning  stars  sang  together,  and 
all  the  sons  of  God  shouted  for  joy." 

The  Jewish  law  had  not  seemed,  for  the 
most  part,  to  go  back  of  Mount  Sinai.  The 
voice  of  God  was  an  inland  voice ;  like  the 
voice  of  man,  it  had  a  place  where  it  be- 
longed—  the  cloud  and  darkness  over  a 
mountain  in  the  wilderness.  It  was  trivial 
with  geography.  It  was  provincial,  per- 
sonal. "The  Lord  said  unto  Moses."  To| 
bring  the  Voice  out  of  a  desert  in  Arabia, 
to  teach  the  world  to  listen  to  the  silence 
of  the  sky  and  the  whisper  of  the  earth  — 
this  is  the  destiny  of  Job.  He  looked  be- 
yond the  Burning  Bush.  The  Day  was  a 
Face  that  watched  the  lives  of  men.  The 
Night  was  a  shadow  for  the  sleep  of  the 
world. 

The  prelude  to  the  Ten  Commandments 
had  been  simply  "  I  am  the  Lord  thy  God, 


TKttbete  TKlast  Cbou  ?  91 


who  brought  thee  out  of  the  land  of  Egypt." 
Egypt  was  enough  infinity  for  the  earlier 
Hebrew  theology.  Mosaic  law  was  based 
upon  an  experience.  The  great  point  of 
the  Hebrew  was  the  Lord's  relation  to  him. 
He  did  not  care  what  God  had  been  do- 
ing before.  Howsoever  it  may  have  been, 
the  earth  had  been  created.  Religion  was 
the  sublimer  way  of  getting  as  much  as 
possible  out  of  it.  The  Lord's  relation  to 
others  was  irrelevant.  The  Hebrews  did 
not  attempt  to  make  converts  of  the  Egyp- 
tians. They  took  their  jewels.  Their  way 
of  converting  the  inhabitants  of  Canaan 
had  been  to  destroy  them,  and  their  indif- 
ference as  to  God's  relation  to  other  men 
took  the  kindred  form  of  an  indifference  as 
to  God's  relation  to  the  natural  world. 
Creation  was  irrelevant.  It  had  occurred, 
and  had  no  practical  bearing  upon  what  God 
would  do  next.  The  natural  world  was  not 
an  expression  of  Him,  but  something  that 
he  had  power  over,  and  as  long  as  they  were 
supplied  with  manna,  and  the  power  was 
used  in  their  behalf,  they  were  satisfied. 


92  Gbe  Sbafcow  Cbrist 


Abraham  was  told  that  his  children  would 
be  as  the  stars  for  multitude,  which  state- 
ment, instead  of  being  a  revelation  of  cre- 
ation to  Abraham,  was  a  calculation.  He 
argued  that  Jehovah  would  keep  his  prom- 
ise because  he  had  kept  other  promises. 
Job  would  have  argued  that  the  Lord 
would  keep  his  promise  because  he  was  the 
Lord  of  the  stars  and  promises  together. 
Job  was  a  poet.  He  established  a  new 
connection. 

The  early  Hebrews  do  not  seem  to  have , 
been  interested  in  the  Lord  —  as  a  Lord. 
They  were  too  shrewd  with  Jehovah  to 
understand  Him.  They  never  forgot  them- 
selves. They  approached  Him  for  a  pur- 
pose, and  to  the  piety  that  is  a  mere  deifi- 
cation of  a  contract,  the  Spirit  is  slow  in 
revealing  itself.  Though  dim  suggestions 
and  beautiful  outlooks  cannot  be  crowded 
out  of  practical  things,  in  divine  revelation, 
as  in  human  art,  the  practical  emphasis  is 
not  practical.  The  too  eager  hand  belongs 
to  closed  eyes.  We  cannot  know  Dante 
by  his  account-book,  nor  Shakspere  by 


"Cdbere  THHast  Cbou?  93 


his  bargains  with  the  actors,  and  Xantippe 
never  knew  Socrates,  because  she  could 
never  see  him  without  compelling  him  to 
do  something  for  her. 

The  point  of  the  Jewish  character,  which 
involves  almost  every  failing,  from  the  lie 
of  Abraham  to  the  rejection  of  Christ,  is 
the  characteristic  Hebrew  inability  to  see 
anything  in  an  impersonal  way,  from  God 
in  the  heavens  to  thirty  pieces  of  silver 
in  the  hands  of  a  priest  Jacob,  wrestling 
with  the  angel  of  the  Lord,  is  the  type  of 
Hebrew  prayer  —  blind,  splendid,  indomit- 
able desire.  The  blessing  is  the  God.  The 
blessing  is  what  God  is  for.  It  is  the  sub- 
limity of  Job  that  his  conception  of  duty 
was  based  not  upon  what  God  had  done 
for  him,  but  upon  God  considered  as  a 
God, — the  wonder  that  he  would  do  any- 
thing for  him  at  all.  The  sublimest  per- 
sonal faith  in  the  Old  Testament  was  based 
upon  impersonality  itself.  For  the  very 
reason  that  God  mocked  him  in  the  whirl- 
wind, "Where  wast  thou  when  I  laid 
the  foundations  of  the  earth  ?  "  Job  clung 


94  Cbc  SbaDow  Cbrist 


to  Him.  It  is  the  mightier  faith  that  is  con- 
quered from  despair.  The  peace  of  awe  was 
upon  him  —  the  breath  from  the  worlds. 
The  skepticism  of  Omar  Khayyam  was  the 
faith  of  Job.  The  worship  of  vastness  in 
which  the  Persian  felt  it  logical  to  lose  his 
soul,  was  Job's  way  of  finding  his. 

"  Impotent  pieces  of  the  game  he  plays 
Upon  this  checkerboard  of  Nights  and  Days ; 
Hither  and  thither  moves  and  checks  and  slays, 
And  one  by  one  in  the  closet  lays. 

"  And  that  inverted  bowl  they  call  the  sky, 
Whereunder,  crawling,  cooped  we  live  and  die, 
Lift  not  your  hands  to  It  for  help  —  for  it 
As  impotently  rolls  as  you  or  I." 

Another  voice : 

"  Hast  thou  commanded  the  morning  since  thy 

days  begun  ? 

And  caused  the  dayspring  to  know  its  place  ? — 
Hast  thou  comprehended  the  breadth  of  the 

earth? 

Declare  if  thou  knowest  it  all. 
Where  is  the  way  to  the  dwelling  of  light  ? 
And  as  for  darkness,  where  is  the  place  thereof, 


IClbere  Xdast  abou?  95 


That  thou  shouldst  take  it  to  the  bound  thereof, 
And  that  thou  shouldst  discern  the  paths  to  the 

house  thereof? 

By  what  way  is  the  light  parted  — 
Or  the  east  wind  scattered  upon  the  earth  ? 
Canst  thou  send  forth  lightnings  that  they  may  go 
And  say  unto  thee, '  Here  we  are '  ?  " 

Singing  under  Omar  Khayyam's  sky : 

"  Oh,  that  my  words  were  written ! 

Oh,  that  they  were  printed  in  a  book ! 

That  they  were  graven  with  an  iron  pen  and  lead, 

They  were  graven  on  the  rock  forever ! 

I  KNOW  THAT  MY  REDEEMER  LIVETH 

And  that  He  shall  stand  at  last  upon  the  earth, 
And  tho'  after  my  skin,  worms  destroy  this  body, 
Yet  in  my  flesh  I  shall  see  God, 
Whom  I  shall  see  for  myself —  \ 

And  mine  eyes  shall  behold  and  not  another !  " 

—  the  angels   of  the  Resurrection  fifteen 
hundred  years  away. 

And  this  is  Job,  finding  glory  in  being 
forgotten.  With  the  night-light  his  soul 
discovered  God.  Under  the  hush  thereof 

"  Behold,  I  am  vile. 
I  lay  mine  hand  upon  my  mouth." 


95  £be  SbaDow  Cbrfst 


"  I  had  heard  of  Thee  by  the  hearing  of  the  ear, 
But  now  mine  eye  seeth  Thee." 

And  Job,  the  inspirer  of  pain,  the  redeemer 
of  sorrow,  forging  out  of  despair  his  mighty 
creed,  marks  the  transition  from  the  child- 
hood to  the  manhood  of  faith. 

The  whole  human  spirit  struggles  in  this 
far-off  song.  The  centuries  met  one  night 
in  this  grand  old  heart. '  Under  the  empty 
sky  they  cried  themselves  out  —  silenced  — 
sky-silenced  —  as  long  as  the  spirit  of  Job 
keeps  answering  in  the  world.  For  the 
few  short  years  we  sojourn  under  the  stars 
a  song  shall  follow  them.  It  is  Job's  sky  — 
and  God's. 

The  discoverer  of  a  lost  Creator,  Job  was 
the  first  pure,  disinterested  worshiper  that 
God  ever  had.  No  longer  a  divine  Con- 
venience, a  Promise-Divinity,  the  Creator 
was  rediscovered  —  drawn  out  from  the  tiny 
nook  of  faith  that  the  desires  of  men  had 
made  for  him,  into  His  Own  House. 


XVI 

Curse  Oo£>  an&  Die 

THE  very  essence  of  Job's  faith  was  its 
breadth.  Breadth  was  its  practicalness.  The 
faith  of  Eliphaz  and  Zophar  and  Bildad  was 
too  narrow  to  cover  the  case.  Job  cries, 
"  Have  pity  on  me,  O  my  friends.  The  hand 
of  God  hath  touched  me."  Zophar  soothes 
him :  "  Such  is  the  portion  of  the  wicked 
man.  Terrors  come  upon  him  and  the  heri- 
tage decreed  from  the  Mighty  One." 

Job  had  lost  his  children.  He  had  lost 
his  flocks.  He  had  lost  all  for  whom  he 
lived,  and  he  had  boils  and — friends. 

Comforting  a  poor  man  in  sorrow  by 
telling  him  that  he  deserved  it,  and  that 
he  will  have  more  if  he  does  not  grant  that 
he  deserves  it,  may  seem  satirical  to  the 
modern  mind,  but  it  must  be  remembered 

7  97 


98  Cbc  Sba&owCbrtat 


of  the  friends  of  Job  that  they  not  only 
began  well,  by  sitting  with  him  seven  days 
and  nights  and  not  saying  anything,  but 
they  offered  the  very  best  comfort,  when 
they  felt  it  dutiful  to  speak,  that  theology 
afforded  at  that  time. 

Trained  to  believe  that  righteousness 
was  remunerative  and  that  unrighteousness 
was  not,  a  mere  glance  at  Job  showed  how 
wicked  he  was,  and  seven  days  and  nights 
of  watching  his  suffering  could  only  deepen 
the  impression  that  came  when  they  had 
first  heard  that  he  had  lost  his  property — 
that  he  must  have  been  a  very  doubtful 
character,  in  spite  of  appearances,  from  the 
first.  This  was  their  theology.  It  was  the 
test  of  their  orthodoxy  that  they  were  on 
the  side  of  the  lost  she- asses  and  the  boils. 
They  very  truly  said  that  they  could  not 
do  differently  —  they  and  the  Lord.  It  was 
the  Mosaic  conception  of  duty  and  its 
reward.  Job  was  a  most  unquestionable 
heretic.  He  did  not  have  a  shadow  of 
precedent  in  his  favor.  Seven  deaths,  and 
a  missing  fortune,  the  Sabeans  and  their 


Curse  <3oO  anD  2>fe  99 


swords,  fire  and  wind,  were  their  argument, 
and  a  wife,  with  her  "  Curse  God  and  die." 

The  real  grandeur  of  Job  was  his  impa- 
tience. His  humility  before  God  is  but  the 
more  beautiful  side  of  his  anger  with  his 
friends,  and  his  self-abasement  before  his 
Maker  is  the  crowning  dignity  of  a  self-re- 
spect which  is  one  of  the  epics  of  the  world. 
The  only  proof  he  had  of  his  righteousness 
was  himself.  And  he  bowed  before  his 
Maker  and  believed  in  Him  because  he 
dared  to  believe  in  that  self  against  hail  and 
fire  and  death  and  the  words  of  men  and 
the  fear  of  their  prim  little  dogma-god. 
"  My  righteousness  I  hold  fast  and  will  not 
let  it  go" — the  parable  of  every  hero  ;  won- 
derful now,  but  more  wonderful  then,  when 
Job  fought  the  mighty  fight  alone,  and 
went  before  us  all  down  through  sorrow  to 
the  heart  of  God. 

His  maintaining  his  righteousness  in  the 
face  of  evil  was  the  shadow  of  the  Messiah. 
Christ  did  not  argue  about  the  cross.  He 
died  on  it.  The  argument  was  in  Job.  Isaiah 
prophesied  the  glory  of  suffering — the  suf- 


ioo  tibe  Sba&ow  Cbrlst 


faring  of  the  righteous;  Job  proved  it  in 
his  life,  Christ  with  his  death.  The  whole 
Hebrew  faith  had  been  put  into  a  honey- 
comb of  special  providences,  and  with  all 
this  array  of  disaster  the  friends  of  Job 
either  had  to  give  up  Job's  righteousness 
or  God's;  either  believe  that  every  detail  of 
good  and  evil  that  happened  to  them  was  a 
special  providence,  which  was  religion ;  or 
special  improvidence,  which  was  atheism. 

It  was  because  Job  would  do  neither  that 
he  struck  out  a  new  path  and  won  the  free- 
dom of  God  —  the  right  to  bring  evil  upon 
those  he  loved ;  one  of  the  first  instances  in 
the  world  in  which  breadth  was  more  prac- 
tical than  narrowness.  Job  was  the  discov- 
erer of  a  practical  faith  which  would  stand 
the  test  of  life,  because  he  was  the  first 
to  take  God's  point  of  view  —  to  see  that 
in  the  nature  of  the  case  it  must  be  a  uni- 
verse ;  that  a  God  whose  point  of  view  was 
not  the  universe  would  not  be  a  God  at  all. 

Infinity  was  gained  with  its  perspective. 
It  was  something  more  than  an  ornament 
of  Deity —  a  poetic  invocation.  It  was  God 


Curse  <5o&  an&  2>fe  101 


himself  living  into  a  vast  system  in  which 
every  soul  and  sorrow  and  blessing  had  its 
place.  The  dovetailing  of  rewards  into  one 
little  existence — the  whole  creation  a  body- 
servant  for  a  worthy  Jew — Job  had  the  sub- 
lime humor  of  every  greater  poet,  and  the 
Little  God  who  does  little  things  for  little 
men  to  gain  a  little  faith  for  a  little  time, 
puttering  with  their  egotism  to  win  their 
souls,  vanished.  The  egotism  which  is  the 
religion  of  the  little  man  when  he  succeeds, 
the  infidelity  of  the  little  man  when  he  fails, 
the  "  I,"  which  is  the  essence  of  littleness, 
which  is  the  blasphemy  alike  of  creeds  and 
curses  and  prayers  and  sneers,  met  its  sub- 
lime, eternal,  triumphant  rebuke  in  Job. 

Though  living  under  a  false  astronomy, 
he  had  just  that  quality  of  selflessness  in  his 
worship  which  would  have  made  him  sur- 
mise that  the  universe  was  not  made  to 
revolve  around  the  earth  as  a  center,  or 
especially  arranged  to  furnish  heat  and  star- 
light to  the  Land  of  Uz.  Such  a  discovery 
on  Job's  part  would  have  been  but  the 
astronomical  form  of  his  theology. 


102  Gbe  SbaDow  Cbrict 


With  the  star  measurements  to  measure 
himself  and  suggest  his  immeasurable  God, 
Job  did  not  expect  the  universe  to  be  pre- 
occupied with  his  estate,  and  performed  his 
duty  without  requiring  it. 

He  was  too  spiritual  to  have  a  Land  of  Uz 
God,  or  a  Job's  God,  or  a  Jews'  God.  With 
their  tiny,  compacted,  Land  of  Uz  faith, 
his  friends  gathered  around  him,  and  ac- 
cused him  of  blasphemy  because  God  was 
so  much  more  of  a  God  to  him  than  to  them; 
because  he  gave  Him  room  and  gave  Him 
time  —  the  prerogatives  of  a  God ;  because 
he  saw  that  even  a  God  was  not  divine 
enough  to  have  a  thousand  centers,  or  hinge 
infinity  on  Uz. 

With  a  breadth  of  conception  that  made 
the  Creator  nearer  as  well  as  farther,  Job 
found  in  the  vast  itself  the  homelikeness  the 
infinite  alone  can  afford  for  our  struggling 
human  faith ;  the  peace  that  passeth  all  un- 
derstanding—  peace  just  because  it  passeth 
all  understanding.  Eliphaz  had  to  under- 
stand. He  could  have  but  the  peace  that 
comes  a  little  at  a  time,  as  understanding 


Curse  <3o&  an&  2>fe  103 


comes,  and  that  moves  away  when  under- 
standing goes.  The  Infinite  is  the  only  rest 
the  finite  has.  Job  rested  in  it. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  Eliphaz  and 
Zophar,  infinity  in  a  God  was  unpractical. 
It  was  vague  —  the  nebula  of  divinity.  It 
had  nothing  definite  to  grasp.  The  men  of 
Uz  could  not  be  governed  by  the  aurora 
borealis.  In  the  burning  of  a  city,  the  re- 
course of  Eliphaz  was  the  Sodom  hypothesis 
—  an  hypothesis  which,  like  all  narrowness, 
was  very  practical  from  one  side,  if,  con- 
sidering the  sins  of  men,  one  ignored,  on 
the  other,  that  the  least  a  logical  God 
could  do  would  be  to  burn  the  city  over 
every  year.  The  doctrine  of  Eliphaz  by  its 
irreverent  definiteness  was  the  greatest  prac- 
tical encouragement  toward  wickedness  in 
his  day.  A  motive  for  righteousness  which 
required  constant  fires  could  hardly  be  prac- 
tical in  a  world  which  could  only  be  kept 
burning  part  of  the  time.  Only  a  broader 
law  applying  before  a  fire  as  well  as  after, 
would  be  worthy  of  a  jurist,  or  a  God. 

Thousands  of  miles  of  telegraph  would 


104  Gbe  SbaDow  Cbrtet 


have  been  scientific  proof  with  which  to 
balance  the  striking  of  his  flocks  by  light- 
ning ;  but  Job  was  a  poet.  He  could  take 
for  granted.  Mystery  was  a  conviction  in 
his  theology,  and  humbleness,  and  giving 
God  the  benefit  of  a  doubt,  and  when  the 
great  wind  smote  his  sons,  he  did  not  need 
several  thousand  years  of  windmills  and 
the  sails  that  discovered  the  New  World, 
to  be  sure  that  God's  arrangements  were 
best,  or  sure  that  wind  had  suddenly  be- 
come a  personal  affront,  had  come  from  the 
ends  of  the  earth  across  snows  and  seas  to 
rebuke  a  man  named  Job.  Job  was  practi- 
cal because  he  was  broad.  He  had  a  definite 
solution  for  the  struggle  of  life  because  he 
was  vague.  Mystery  was  the  conviction 
that  made  his  theology  at  once  the  sublim- 
est  and  most  practical  conception  of  the 
living  One. 

He  was  the  first  to  give  God  time,  the 
first  to  give  Him  room,  the  first  to  see  His 
long  looks,  His  glances  of  a  thousand  years. 
Out  of  the  treasuries  of  the  snow,  the  guid- 
ing of  mornings  and  wandering  of  nights, 


Curse  <3oD  an&  Die  105 


and  all  the  vast  and  beautiful  care  of  the 
infinite  heart,  Job  learned  the  awe  that  was 
to  make  his  faith  one  of  the  mighty  memo- 
ries of  men. 

Thus  he  was  the  emancipator  of  right- 
eousness, the  inspirer  of  pain.  He  shall  be 
remembered  as  the  redeemer  of  sorrow,  one 
who  could  sing  with  a  cross ;  one  who  lifted 
duty  above  reward  and  degraded  sin  be- 
low punishment,  because  he  discovered  the 
infinity  of  God,  because  he  lost  himself  in 
the  wideness  of  His  ways. 


XVII 

2>otb  Hot  Wfsoom  Crp  ano  Ulnoer* 
standing  put  ffortb  1ber  Dolce? 

SOLOMON  could  not  keep  the  Proverbs. 
So  he  wrote  them.  The  founder  of  moral 
philosophy  —  the  duty  which  Moses  stated 
and  David  attempted,  Solomon  explained. 
Morality  passed  into  its  motto  stage. 

But  the  prayer  at  the  dedication  of  the 
temple  must  be  read  with  the  eleventh 
chapter  of  Kings.1  And  "  Without  me  ye 
can  do  nothing." 

A  book  with  a  less  inspired  conception 
than  the  Bible,  of  religion,  and  therefore  of 
art,  following  the  more  common  human  in- 
stinct, would  have  suppressed  this  chapter 
in  Kings.  Solomon's  literary  executors, 

1  But  King  Solomon  loved  many  strange  women  .  .  . 
and  his  wives  turned  away  his  heart. 

108 


2>otb  flot  UDlfsOom  Crs  1  107 


seeing  that  it  would  jar  upon  the  artistic 
unity  of  his  work,  would  have  arranged 
the  writing  of  his  biography  with  decorous 
deceit.  It  would  have  had  all  those  un- 
prophetic  omissions  that  belong  to  the  nar- 
rower idea  of  beauty  and  the  smaller  artists' 
cowardice  of  life.  The  readers  of  Proverbs 
for  thousands  of  years  would  have  inno- 
cently longed  to  be  like  Solomon.  The 
world  would  have  been  set  back  in  its  spirit- 
ual achievement  for  an  indefinite  period, 
and  all  those  reserves  of  knowledge  which 
come  of  knowledge  experiencing  itself,  would 
have  been  lost.  Confidently  working  upon 
the  impossible,  full  of  the  glad  conscious- 
ness that  the  Proverbs  were  the  solution  of 
moral  effort;  in  the  blind,  crude  ways  of 
life  would  the  world  have  learned  that 
there  had  been  a  lie  somewhere  —  a  moral 
romance — that  had  to  be  suffered  and  suf- 
fered away  from  the  human  heart  —  be- 
cause the  perfect  finish  of  Solomon's  art 
had  been  preserved. 

To  the  sublime  literary  morality  of  the 
Bible  we  are  indebted  for  the  fact  that  the 


io8  Gbe  Sba&ow  Gbrist 


most  valuable  contribution  that  Solomon 
made  to  us  was  not  thus  sacrificed  —  the 
comment  of  the  eleventh  chapter  of  Kings 
upon  the  three  thousand  Proverbs.  Called 
the  wisest  man  in  the  world  because  he  re- 
pented in  bons  mots,  because  no  one  has  had 
so  gifted  a  repentance  since,  Solomon  will  be 
immortal  in  the  minds  of  men,  because  of  his 
consummate  literary  longing  to  have  them 
do  wrong  more  wisely.  Eloquence  is  not 
having  what  we  want,  but  wanting  it.  Wis- 
dom is  the  art  of  demanding  that  others 
shall  do  better  than  ourselves.  A  proverb 
is  saying  what  we  wish  we  had  done,  or 
hoped  that  we  would,  and  all  the  wise  say- 
ings that  stretch  their  dainty  rhetoric  over 
our  naked  lives  are  the  inventories  of  our 
ignorance — the  retrospect  of  the  beauty 
we  have  lost. 

The  great  Redeemer  Satire  of  the  Old 
Testament,  Solomon  comes  to  us  the  cli- 
max of  the  bitter  truth — the  human  heart 
waiting  with  words,  bitterly  with  words — 
with  words — outside  of  the  gates  of  Beth- 
lehem. Giving  to  the  Hebrews  a  larger 


2>otb  Hot  1ICU0J>om  Crg7  109 


assortment  of  thoroughly  understood  sins, 
and  no  inspiration  to  avoid  them,  except 
an  ironical  life  —  "I  have  not  kept  these 
Proverbs;  how  much  less  chance  there  is 
for  you,  who  cannot  even  say  them  " — this 
was  the  mission  of  the  wisest  man  in  the 
world. 

And  yet  that  it  was  better  for  men  to 
do  wrong  intelligently  than  ignorantly,  this 
passing  phase  of  mottoes  shall  stand  as 
one  of  the  records  of  God.  The  moral 
philosophy  which  had  been  simply  God's 
convenience,  came  to  an  end  in  this  ques- 
tioning and  observing  of  life.  Solomon 
went  back  of  the  divine  will  to  the  nature 
of  things.  Bringing  the  Law  out  from  the 
mere  authority  of  One  in  whom  a  man 
might  believe  or  might  not,  he  surrounded 
it  with  the  authority  of  this  actual  world, 
in  which  a  man  has  to  live,  whatever  he 
believes.  It  was  the  discovery  of  reason- 
ableness, of  what  might  be  called  the  mind 
of  God. 

The  natural  rudimentary  Mosaic  attitude 
toward  a  fire  —  not  that  it  blisters,  but  that 


i  io  £be  SbaDow  Cbrtet 


it  has  been  said,  "  Thou  shalt  not  touch  it," 
—  finds  its  supplement  in  Solomon;  and  the 
higher  obedience,  based  upon  knowledge,  in 
the  brilliant  son  of  David  comes  to  its  first 
great  emphasis.  Philosophy  was  the  study 
of  blisters. 

Discovering  a  larger  man,  as  Job  had  dis- 
covered a  larger  God,  he  represents  a  hu- 
manist movement,  the  turning  of  man  to 
himself —  the  self-discovery  which  wrought 
out  as  a  habit  of  thought  the  identity  of 
the  moral  law  with  the  nature  of  man.  A 
teacher  of  the  experiences  of  morality,  Solo- 
mon connected  the  mystical  voice  of  Sinai 
with  the  conscience  of  every  day,  and  the  re- 
ligion of  what  they  knew  about  themselves 
as  well  as  the  religion  of  what  they  had  been 
told  about  their  God  was  given  to  the  race. 

But  the  higher  value  of  Solomon's  reign 
was  not  this.  It  is  only  by  standing  in 
the  ruins  of  his  temple  that  we  can  worship 
there,  can  read  in  the  mighty,  broken  out- 
lines the  truth  at  last.  Built  with  proverb 
and  stone  and  gold,  it  is  one  of  the  great 
half-truths  of  history,  completed  alone  by 


Dotb  Hot  TWlfsOom  Crg? 


being  half  destroyed.  The  Saracen  in  fierce 
unconsciousness  was  to  become  the  inter- 
preter of  Solomon,  bringing  to  its  logical 
conclusion  in  the  dust  of  the  earth  the  gos- 
pel of  the  eleventh  chapter  of  Kings. 

At  once  the  discoverer  of  moral  philos- 
ophy as  the  theory  of  heaven  and  the  way 
to  hell,  Solomon  is  the  immortal  illustration 
of  the  merely  moral  man  —  not  that  he  was 
moral,  or  that  the  merely  moral  man  is  ever 
moral,  but  that  he  is  impossible.  The  oft- 
recurring  type  of  the  broad  and  under- 
standing man  who  enlarges  the  area  of  the 
truth  without  having  life  enough  to  cover 
it,  finds  its  great  original  in  one  who  sub- 
stituted reasonableness  for  righteousness 
and  forgot  God  in  building  a  temple  for 
Him. 

The  history  of  the  human  race  is  the 
Brobdingnag  biography  of  every  unknown 
soul.  The  passing  phases  of  our  lives  are 
the  old  shadows  of  these  mightier  destinies 
that  have  crossed  our  world,  to  prove  with  a 
classic  tragedy  what  we  know  with  a  pass- 
ing thought. 


ii*  Gbe  Sba&ow  Cbrtst 

Nations  have  been  born  and  lived  and  died 
to  furnish  the  moral  philosophy  of  a  child, 
of  an  afternoon.  With  a  thousand  years 
and  a  million  sorrowing  hearts  tucked  into 
his  epigrams,  Solomon  himself  shall  be  to  us 
an  unforgotten  proverb  —  a  great  experi- 
ence of  the  world.  Writing  a  book  which 
has  the  distinction  of  being  the  only  book 
in  the  Bible  that  every  one  outgrows,  his 
appeal  is  to  the  time  of  crudeness,  when 
observation  is  still  piety  and  the  will  not 
yet  unmasked,  still  proud  of  its  trim  om- 
nipotence. In  the  time  of  spiritual  glib- 
ness  and  dogmatic  confidence,  in  the  zest 
of  our  ignorance,  we  conjure  inspiration  out 
of  Proverbs  and  dream  of  life,  but  to  life 
itself  must  always  come  the  wondering 
humbleness  of  the  New  Testament.  To  live 
is  yet  to  look  back  upon  Solomon's  sayings 
with  sad  wonder  at  ourselves.  With  their 
tiny  courtly  glory  in  the  struggle  of  the 
years,  they  but  linger  by  the  name  of  Christ 
—  dim,  pathetic  decorations  on  the  stern- 
ness and  the  realness  and  the  silence  of  the 
cross. 


H>otb  Hot  IKlisOom  Crg?  113 


David  was  not  a  philosopher,  and  Solo- 
mon would  have  patronized  the  childishness 
of  his  father's  faith,  but  the  Son  of  God  was 
called  the  son  of  David  because  Solomon 
was  not ;  and  the  only  value  of  the  temple 
that  the  wise  king  built,  was  that  his  father's 
prayers  would  be  prayed  there,  that  long 
after  the  stately  obviousness  of  the  Proverbs 
had  become  an  old  ornament  in  the  world, 
the  songs  of  David's  spirit  should  be  upon 
the  lips  of  the  nations  as  far  as  sin  and  long- 
ing and  hope  and  fear  have  reached  their 
cries  upon  the  earth — the  wise  earth — the 
wearily- wise  earth  —  the  hungering  and 
thirsting  earth  —  parched  with  proverbs  — 
dying  with  epigrams  —  waiting  for  God. 


XVIII 
IDanitp!  HU  is  IDanttp 


ECCLESIASTES  is  the  text-book  of  suicides. 
Though  not  without  hope,  the  hope  is  a 
gilded  discouragement,  lighting  the  world 
to  show  how  dark  it  is.  Only  in  a  book 
as  supremely  victorious  as  the  Bible  could 
such  an  appealing  and  beautiful  prophecy  of 
despair  be  safely  printed.  It  is  the  shadow- 
song  of  the  earth.  It  is  the  masterpiece  of 
the  Night.  It  is  the  culmination  of  the 
Proverbs  and  the  lives  of  the  kings.  "  As 
when  a  hungry  man  dreameth  and  behold 
he  eateth,  and  he  waketh  and  his  soul 
is  empty."  Sadder  than  David's  Psalms, 
because  they  had  tears  ;  sadder  than  death, 
because  there  was  no  death,  it  is  the  confes- 
sional of  wisdom,  and  through  its  wonder- 
ful lines,  hallowed  with  a  broken  heart,  the 

114 


DanftB!  HU  is  IDanitg        115 


restless  spirit  of  man  shall  move  forever  to 
find  in  its  forbidding  fellowship,  its  sublime 
self-pity,  the  Miserere  of  the  world.  Even 
when  the  poet  comes  to  his  climax  and 
struggles  toward  joy  —  "Rejoice,  O  young 
man.  Remove  sorrow  from  thine  heart," — 
the  Gloria  strives  for  its  voices  in  the  song  of 
youth  only  to  modulate  into  death,  death, 
death,  "  When  the  mourners  go  about  the 
streets  and  the  dust  returns  to  the  earth  as 
it  was  and  the  spirit  to  God  who  gave  it." 
"  Vanity !  Vanity !  All  is  vanity  !  " —  the 
litany  of  philosophy,  closing  at  last  with  its 
saddest  sentence,  "All  hath  been  heard," 
in  the  middle  of  the  Bible. 

The  pitiful  attempt  at  a  New  Testament, 
Ecclesiastes  is  the  caricature  of  a  Proverb 
straining  to  be  a  cross.  The  immortal  argu- 
ment of  the  merely  moral  man  confuted  by 
himself,  it  marks  at  once  the  beginning  of 
moral  philosophy  as  a  contribution  to  man- 
kind, and  the  end  of  moral  philosophy  as 
the  solution  of  human  life. 

The  author  of  Ecclesiastes,  whoever  he 
may  have  been,  was  a  man  like  men  :  a  uni- 


Sbafcow  Cbrtst 


versal  man.  The  last  testament  of  a  man 
of  affairs  —  a  scholar,  a  seer,  a  diplomat,  a 
lover, —  it  cannot  be  set  aside  as  the  dis- 
couraged wisdom  of  a  monk  or  the  pessim- 
ism of  an  aloof  life. 

I  adjure  you,  O  daughters  of  Jerusalem, 
By  the  roes  and  the  hinds  of  the  fields, 
That  ye  stir  not  up  nor  waken  love 

—  the  wooing  strain  in  the  song  of  Solo- 
mon floats  softly  through  all  the  lines  of 
what  must  ever  stand  as  the  most  experi- 
enced book  in  the  Old  Testament ;  the  very 
force  and  completeness  of  which  is  alto- 
gether lost  if  it  is  not  the  symphony  of  a 
wonderful  and  various  life.  The  love-song 
motif,  "Awake,  O  North  Wind,  and  blow 
thou  South ! "  like  the  ghost  of  a  brighter 
melody  through  the  mighty  minor  chords 
that  sing  the  weariness  of  the  world,  winds 
ever  like  a  beauty  that  is  lost,  not  by  being 
overlooked,  but  by  having  been  lived  down 
through  to  bitterness.  "One  generation 
goeth  and  another  generation  cometh,  and 


DanitB!  SU  ts  Wanitg        »7 


the  earth  abideth  forever,"  and  the  minor 
chords,  and  "  That  which  hath  been  is  that 
which  shall  be,  and  that  which  is  to  be  hath 
already  been,  and  God  seeketh  again  that 
which  hath  passed  away." 

"  All  hath  been  heard."  The  voices  are 
still  and  the  world  sleeps  and  dreams  and 
waits.  The  hush  of  darkness  is  upon  it.  It 
is  the  starlight  Revelation. 

No  man  knoweth.  The  morning  comes 
at  midnight — only  to  God. 


XIX 

Sbafcow  Cbrist 


IT  was  a  most  startling  hypothesis  that 
came  to  the  unknown  Isaiah :  "  If  God  were 
to  come  to  Judea  and  live,  what  kind  of 
man  would  he  be?" 

To  be  original  is  to  discover  the  com- 
monplace of  a  thousand  years  —  to  face  at 
first  the  sneer  that  no  one  would  have 
thought  of  it,  and  at  last  the  indifference 
because  any  one  would.  He  who  thinks  a 
mighty  thought  weaves  him  an  immortal 
shroud.  Fame  is  the  beginning  of  forget- 
ting. To  be  great  is  to  take  one  of  the 
habits  of  the  gods — to  move  everywhere 
unknown — to  be  accorded  the  world  for  a 
burial-ground  —  to  be  a  spirit,  a  thought 
—  to  breathe  through  the  unnamed  winds. 
To  be  great  is  to  be  capable  of  becoming 
us 


3be  SbaDow  Gbrtet  119 


as  commonplace  as  the  rustling  of  the 
leaves,  and  sunshine,  and  Christ.  It  shall 
need  a  prophet  to  tell  who  a  prophet  was 
— to  distill  his  spirit  out  of  the  souls  of  men. 
He  shall  be  a  wraith,  gathered  out  of  life 
like  the  morning  mists.  Men  shall  strive 
to  divine  his  face,  shall  paint  and  sing 
—  shall  seek  to  say,  "This  is  he";  but  out 
of  the  Dust  and  the  Spirit  he  came.  To 
the  Spirit  and  the  Dust  he  shall  return. 

Immortality  has  been  the  romance  of 
little  men  thrumming  their  harps  in  a  little 
age.  Out  of  the  ground  itself  has  science 
brought  its  mighty  measure.  It  shall  be 
a  silent  word.  With  his  tinsel  little  thou- 
sands of  years,  there  is  one  who  sings  the 
loves  of  a  woman  in  Troy.  His  name  is 
called  immortal.  With  the  pantomime  of 
history  flocking  through  his  heart,  there  is 
one  who  sings  the  coming  of  the  love  of 
God,  and  the  generations  ask,  "What  is 
his  name  ?  Where  was  his  abiding-place  ? 
Who  knew  him  first?"  And  the  answer 
shall  be  to  every  man  :  "  His  name  shall 
be  upon  thy  forehead.  The  spirit  in  thine 


120  abe  Sba&ow  Gbrist 


eyes  shall  be  to  him  for  a  name.  Its  se- 
cret shall  be  life." 

A  prophet  shall  be  the  world  itself.  His 
breath  shall  blow  from  the  seas.  His  im- 
mortality shall  be  nameless — like  the  im- 
mortalities of  God — through  the  passing 
of  flowers  and  suns.  He  shall  be  a  convic- 
tion. He  shall  be  a  habit  among  the  sons 
of  men.  About  his  spirit  we  shall  build  the 
faint  and  curious  scaffoldings  of  history — 
that  we  may  strive  to  rebuild  his  life.  We 
shall  gather  from  afar  the  tokens  of  his  time 
—  the  pathetic  little  heaps — the  dust  of 
research.  We  shall  blow  it  wisely  in  each 
other's  eyes ;  but  we  shall  not  know  —  that 
greatest  knowledge  of  all  —  that  knowledge 
of  how  knowledge  came  —  that  knowledge 
of  how  it  was  before  the  knowledge  came; 
or  guess  but  dimly  that  mighty  day  when 
the  Incarnation  Truth  was  fresh  in  the  heart 
of  a  man  —  fresh  as  the  face  of  the  earth 
when  God  gazed  down  that  Creation  morn- 
ing, when  He  unfolded  it  out  of  darkness 
and  loved  it  first. 

We  shall  never  know  how  dark  it  was  nor 


SbaDow  Cbrist  121 


how  light  the  light  was,  when,  like  a  vast 
conjecture — amorphous,  terrible,  beautiful, 
tender,  infinite,  in  the  spirit  of  one  who 
dreamed,  there  loomed  the  great  Redeemer- 
Dream  and  sounded  the  chorus  of  all  the 
earth — when  to  the  first  disciple  of  Jesus, 
hundreds  of  years  away,  there  came  as 
generations  coming  with  oratorios  on  their 
lips : 

Hast  thou  not  known  ?    Hast  thou  not  heard? 
Hath  it  not  been  told  thee  from  the  beginning? 

It  is  the  everlasting  God  —  the  Lord  —  the 
Creator  of  the  ends  of  the  earth  — 

then  the  sudden  silence — the  Isaiah  silence 
— and  the  sweetest,  strangest  solo  in  all  the 
world  singing  like  a  little  child's  heart: 

He  shall  feed  His  flock  like  a  shepherd;  He 
shall  gather  the  lambs  in  His  arms  and  carry 
them  in  His  bosom,  and  gently  lead  those  that 
are  with  young. 

The  time  of  the  blending  of  a  human 
song  with  the  music  of  the  spheres,  when 


Cbrist 


Isaiah  caught  the  longing  of  God  from  the 
stars  —  when  he  knew  the  divinity  of  His 
coming  down  —  bitterly  and  completely 
down — to  the  love  of  Mary  and  the  cry 
on  the  Cross. 

The  more  beautiful  Bethlehem  was  in 
Isaiah's  heart.  Like  the  Wise  Men  of  the 
East,  Moses  and  Job  and  David  had  brought 
their  offerings  there,  and  in  the  synthesis 
of  the  three  great  conceptions  of  God  —  in 
the  wonder  of  their  being  together  —  the 
book  that  is  called  Isaiah  is  the  struggle  of 
the  world's  dream — the  Saviour  sleep — the 
unwaked  New  Testament 


XX 

Ube  Sbafcow  Gbrfst 
ii 

A  GREAT  man  is  one  who  makes  the  world 
greater  to  find  room  for  himself.  A  thou- 
sand years  to  him  and  God  are  but  as  yes- 
terday when  it  is  passed.  He  has  the  mimic 
omnipresence  of  a  soul  wont  to  walk  under 
the  eaves  of  heaven  with  the  Maker  of  the 
earth.  The  mighty  one  of  every  era  is  thou- 
sands of  years  away  from  those  who  dwell 
with  him,  and  all  the  great  men  of  the  scat- 
tered years  are  nearer  to  each  other  than 
to  the  dates  that  gossip  on  their  tombstones 
— the  little  difference  that  it  makes  when 
they  are  born,  or  the  figures  that  tell  us 
when  they  could  not  die. 

The  hero's  solitude  is  his  fellowship  with 
heroes.  From  the  years  to  the  east  and 
the  years  to  the  west  they  come.  The  paths 


124  3be  SbaDow  Cbrist 

are  short  between  the  centuries,  when, 
seeking  their  mighty  kindred,  the  great  go 
forth  to  visit  in  a  prophet's  heart ;  and  from 
the  beginning  of  the  world  transfiguration 
is  the  habit,  the  secret  of  every  colossal 
life.  "Live,  O  my  mighty  brother,"  the 
Secret  says,  "live  in  the  littleness  about 
thee,  doomed  to  the  dullness,  gentle  with 
the  pain.  When  the  empty  roar  is  stilled 
and  over  the  dear  blind  makers  of  the  Noise 
shall  reach  the  great  soft  hand  of  Sleep — 
there  shall  be  the  sound  of  coming — the 
gathering  of  thy  brothers  from  afar;  in  the 
peace  above  the  world  shalt  thou  walk 
with  them.  In  the  trysting-place  of  pro- 
phets thou  shalt  touch  their  hands.  From 
their  eyes  thy  soul  shall  drink.  As  the 
night  gathers  the  dew,  their  thought  shall 
descend  upon  thee — glistening,  refreshing, 
full  of  morning  love;  it  shall  be  to  thee 
for  solemn  delight — the  faith  for  thy  sac- 
rifice. It  shall  be  the  word  thou  shalt 
speak  when  the  Dawn  and  thou  go  down 
between  the  hills.  Thou  shalt  not  look 
back  nor  falter.  Thy  brotherhood  with 


Sba&ow  Cbrist  125 


prophets  shall  be  to  live  without  them.  It 
shall  be  to  believe  in  the  greatness  of  lit- 
tle men — calling  to  it — pleading  with  it. 
Whether  it  come  to  thy  face  or  to  thy 
cross  or  to  thy  grave,  their  greatness  shall 
be  for  thy  greatness — created  out  of  thy 
heart,  humbled  with  thy  sorrow,  builded 
into  the  world." 

The  "  Comfort  ye,  comfort  ye,  my  peo- 
ple" was  the  Unknown  Isaiah's  way  of 
coming  down  from  transfiguration. 

Going  to  and  fro,  looking  into  every  face 
for  a  hero,  demanding,  expecting,  chal- 
lenging, believing,  Isaiah  prophesied  the 
Christ.  Across  the  souls  of  his  brothers 
he  saw  Him  coming.  Out  of  the  east,  out 
of  the  west,  out  of  the  north  and  the  south, 
out  of  sorrow  and  exile  and  desire  and  de- 
spair— the  gathering  of  God — to  be  born 
in  Bethlehem.  The  Wise  Men  saw  the  star 
in  the  East  and  came  across  the  deserts  to 
the  birth.  Isaiah  saw  it  in  the  spirit  of 
men.  He  was  in  Gethsemane.  The  cry 
of  the  mob  and  the  cry  on  the  cross  were 
convictions  in  the  struggle  of  his  life.  His 


iz6  tfbe  sba&ow  Cbrtst 


prophecy  was  the  irrevocable  insight  of 
love.  The  Night  gathered  as  he  gazed 
upon  men.  Tenderly  and  softly  over  his 
glowing  thoughts,  the  Christ-spirit  came — 
the  hush,  the  Shadow,  the  Cross.  It  was 
no  fragmentary,  unconnected,  beautiful  rev- 
erie of  sadness,  coming  like  a  voice  on  the 
air  to  be  noted  down  with  a  pen.  It  was 
not  a  reported  prophecy.  It  was  life  itself. 
It  was  his  coming  down  from  a  transfigu- 
ration, it  was  the  more  actual,  intimate 
prophecy — written  on  the  street.  Look- 
ing into  his  brothers'  eyes  he  wrote  it.  He 
saw  that  the  denials  of  Peter  were  there, 
that  the  stripes  of  Pilate  could  not  be 
helped,  and  that  Philip's  cruel  question 
was  eternal  upon  the  lips  of  men.  He 
knew.  He  utterly  knew — that  on  an 
earth  where  even  a  man  could  not  be  great 
without  a  sorrow,  a  God  without  a  cross 
would  not  even  be  a  man. 

It  was  no  great  outside  angel's  voice 
leaning  over  his  trembling  body  and  tell- 
ing him  to  write.  It  was  no  journalistic 
divining  of  events,  no  inspired  information 


Sbafcow  Cbrtst  127 


of  circumstance.  It  was  a  profound  expe- 
rience with  the  nature  and  law  of  life — a 
colossal  judgment  of  the  human  race. 

Gazing  into  its  grandeur  and  its  coward- 
ice, he  saw  the  inevitable  conflict  there. 
Out  of  the  human  heart  itself  deciphered 
the  Creator's  Secret  for  this  earth  —  the 
passion  of  history — the  Gethsemane  —  the 
Truth. 


XXI 

TTbe  Sbafcow  Gbrtet 
in 

ISAIAH'S  transfiguration — his  talking  with 
Jesus  across  the  generations — his  outreach- 
ing  through  the  future  for  a  Man,  was  but 
the  half  of  his  prophecy.  There  have  been 
candidates  for  prophets  and  candidates  for 
saviours.  There  have  been  great-men-elect 
— natures  that  have  conquered  the  forty 
days'  fast  and  the  temptation  with  Satan — 
who  could  not  put  their  transfigurations 
behind  them  —  and  failed.  Poets  may  live 
in  transfigurations.  Prophets  will  not.  They 
may  go  there  to  rest —  as  Christ  with  Moses 
and  Elias  —  to  be  soothed  a  little,  to  feel 
the  coolness  and  the  peace  of  God's  hand, 
that  it  may  touch  for  a  moment  the  fever 
on  their  brows.  Then  to  work. 

The  mingling  of  a  transfiguration  and  a 


TXbe  Sba&ow  Cbrist  129 


fact  makes  a  prophet  possible.  The  look- 
ing for  a  Man  now  makes  him  inevitable. 
Poetry  may  be  truth.  Prophecy  is  where 
truth  connects  with  the  next  thing  to  do. 
It  is  the  sad  end  of  the  truth,  but  it  is  the 
end  where  heroes  are,  where  ideals  are  ideal- 
ized into  facts,  where  great  men,  struggling 
for  their  faith,  reach  up  their  holy  hands  as 
though  they  would  fasten  the  skies  to  the 
earth,  as  though  with  their  very  crosses  they 
would  hold  them  low  for  the  prayers  of  men. 
The  forgetful  transfiguration  may  be  more 
beautiful  than  the  applied  one — 'the  foreign 
beauty,  the  unrighteous  beauty  of  peace 
when  there  is  no  peace ;  but  Isaiah  prophe- 
sied the  incarnation  because  incarnation 
was  the  habit  of  his  life.  He  speaks  the 
truth  for  all  times  because  he  was  trying 
to  find  a  truth  big  enough  for  his  own  — 
and  build  it  there.  This  is  the  essential 
fact  about  the  essential  prophecy  of  his- 
tory. It  was  incarnation  that  conceived 
Incarnation. 

The  bare  idea  of  having  a  Messiah  turns 
upon  the  Isaiah  experience  without  one — 


tTbe  Sba&ow  Cbrist 


the  fierce  intentness  of  a  practical  struggler 
with  a  nation,  forced  into  prophecy  by  the 
problem  of  life  —  the  problem  that  comes 
to  all  of  us,  as,  out  of  the  sad  and  scat- 
tered years,  comrades  of  the  sun  and  com- 
rades of  the  grave,  we  walk  between  them, 
this  one  great  question  ringing  in  our  ears 
through  the  irrevocable  days :  "  Shall  we 
be  impossible  gods,  poor  wistful  gods,  half- 
created  gods,  on  this  earth  of  men ;  or  shall 
we  not  ?" — the  challenge  of  the  incarnation. 
To  accept  it  is  to  live  with  the  divine,  the  in- 
finite, the  unattainable,  striking  its  splen- 
did sorrow  through  all  our  deeds  —  beau- 
tiful, incomplete,  glorious,  defeated,  dying. 
To  refuse  it  is  to  mumble  a  love  of  what 
we  dare  not  be,  and  call  it  worship.  It  is 
to  whimper  for  a  better  world  and  call  it 
religion.  It  is  to  be  abdicated  gods,  be- 
cause divinity  has  no  chance  withal,  because 
there  are  no  conveniences  for  heroes  on  the 
earth. 

When  our  hearts  are  in  tumult,  and  we 
are  cast  down,  the  incarnation  challenge 
comes.  When  the  day  is  over,  when  our 


Sba&ow  Cbrtet  131 

brother  has  returned  us  hate  for  love,  dull- 
ness for  insight,  when  he  has  cursed  the 
dearest  we  could  give,  we  shall  go  forth 
to  the  calm  and  absent-looking  sky.  We 
shall  say :  "  It  were  simple  to  be  a  God  — 
safe  beyond  the  stars."  From  the  vast 
resting-places  in  the  deep  the  winds  shall 
come  to  us.  They  shall  blow  upon  the 
fever  in  our  faces  and  we  shall  say :  "  It 
were  simple  enough  to  be  a  God  —  off 
where  the  winds  begin;  to  be  a  God  alone, 
to  be  a  monk- God,  with  a  universe  for  a 
hermitage,  with  worlds  for  infinite  retreat ; 
but  to  be  a  god  here,  to  have  a  god's 
desires  and  a  man's  chance  —  to  be  mock- 
ingly eternal  and  cabined  in  days  and 
nights, —  to  be  infinite  and  dream  stars,  and 
be  riveted  down  to  the  ground, —  to  have 
wings  of  love  and  be  fastened  to  hate  and 
wedded  to  blindness  and  mingled  with 
beasts  and  harried  hither  and  thither  in  the 
great  unseemly  shambles,  where  men  think 
they  live  and  do  not  even  learn  to  die,  and 
where  they  curse,  and  cast  their  souls  into 
the  filth,  and  trample  their  brothers  under 


132  3be  Sba&ow  Cbrist 


their  feet  for  the  filth  itself,  and  burn  their 
heroes  at  the  stake !  Safe  in  infinity,  with 
all  Space  in  which  to  be  Himself,  shall  a 
God  who  has  made  the  worlds  as  He  wished 
them  to  be  require  a  man  to  be  a  god  in 
a  world  which  he  did  not  make,  a  world 
which  he  did  not  choose,  a  world  where  to 
undertake  to  be  a  man  is  more  than  a  god 
would  care  to  do  ?  "  Thus  the  incarnation 
challenge  comes, 

It  were  indeed  a  god's  world,  framed  for 
heaven,  with  its  vast  delights,  bounded  by 
skies  and  singing  its  own  music  day  unto 
day.  With  one's  own  soul  listening  in  it, 
it  were  easy  to  be  a  god  alone — to  let 
the  links  of  light  and  the  links  of  darkness, 
of  song  and  starlight  and  sleep,  fall  across 
the  years  and  bind  us  to  its  joy  forever. 
It  were  easy  to  be  a  god  thus — or  to  be  a 
god  with  gods,^to  troop  through  the  vales 
of  the  earth  and  look  into  each  other's 
souls;  but  to  be  a  god  with  men? 

The  problem  of  every  soul  when  the 
sons  of  God  go  forth  to  live. 

Therefore  God's  problem — the  struggle 


SbaDow  Cbrlst  133 


with  environment.  The  Messianic  answer 
was  the  conviction  of  history,  the  gath- 
ered voice  of  the  human  race,  exalted 
into  the  utterance  of  one  who  prophesied 
the  Messiah  because  to  him  a  God  who 
would  ask  of  His  creatures  more  than 
He  would  do  Himself  would  not  be  a  God 
at  all. 

Thus  came  to  pass  the  tremulous  gospel 
— the  writing  of  John  across  the  soul  of 
Isaiah. 

"  In  the  beginning  was  the  Word  and  the 
Word  was  with  God  and  the  Word  was 
God  and  the  Word  was  made  flesh  and 
dwelt  among  men." 


XXII 

Sbafcow  Cbrtet 

IV 


THE  righteousness  of  God  had  been  con- 
ceived before.  Moses  had  bound  it  about 
the  soul.  His  fatherhood  had  been  con- 
ceived. David  had  sung  it  into  one  of 
the  habits  of  Hebrew  life.  Job  had  made 
it  an  infinite  fatherhood.  Ethics  had  been 
thought  out  as  a  science.  Men  had  con- 
ceived of  a  man  in  God's  place  for  thou- 
sands of  years.  The  man  had  been  their 
God.  Isaiah  was  a  poet  and  conceived  of 
a  God  in  a  man's  place.  The  turning  of 
this  thought  was  the  crisis  of  the  world. 
Henceforth  worship,  which  had  been  an 
effort  —  a  scattering,  an  outgoing  of  the 
human  heart  into  the  Vast,  a  spreading  of 
our  little  prayers  across  the  sky  —  should 
be  an  incoming,  a  shining  down.  The  in- 


£be  SbaDow  Cbrist  135 


carnation  was  the  concentration  of  God — 
the  decree  that  the  infinite  should  be  the 
neighborhood  of  life. 

But  the  greater  idea,  in  its  divine  neces- 
sity, its  logicalness,  was  not  Isaiah's  idea 
of  having  a  Messiah.  It  was  his  idea  of 
what  He  would  be  when  He  came:  the  in- 
credible conception  that  when  the  Maker 
of  the  earth  descended,  He  would  be  de- 
spised and  rejected  of  men — the  sublimest 
accusation  of  history,  the  supreme  satire 
upon  the  human  race,  the  most  beautiful 
and  awful  reach  of  insight  the  world  has 
known. 

It  was  the  intense  humanness  of  this 
divinest  prophet  which  alone  could  have 
anticipated  the  divinity,  not  of  God's  being 
a  God,  but  the  greater  divinity  of  His  being 
a  man  ;  His  giving  up  a  God's  opportuni- 
ties, His  being  a  struggling  God,  with  the 
little  human  outfit  of  Space  and  Time  and 
Circumstance  with  which  He  asked  Isaiah 
to  be  a  prophet  for  Him  and  Peter  to  die 
for  Him.  There  came  to  the  vision  of  the 
seer,  the  Cross  —  the  Consistent  Creator — 


136  Gbe  Sbafcow  Cbrtst 


showing  to  the  human  heart  what  He  really 
was.  Approaching  his  conception  out  of 
the  atmosphere  of  the  God  of  Israel  in- 
stead of  the  memory  of  the  Saviour  Himself, 
Isaiah's  anticipation  bears  within  it  a  sense 
of  the  divine  sacrifice  so  profound,  so  mas- 
terful, so  full  of  praise  and  onwardness,  of 
vast,  exultant  sorrow,  that  it  sweeps  its  glo- 
rious tides  into  the  New  Testament  itself, 
where  the  soul  of  Isaiah  overflows  and 
breaks  its  prophecies  upon  the  words  of 
Paul  and  fills  the  very  presence  of  Christ 
with  the  fullness  of  the  past. 

It  is  too  much  to  expect  that  a  man  great 
enough  to  prophesy  a  Messiah  should  have 
been  at  hand  to  interpret  him  when  He 
came,  but  one  cannot  but  wonder  how  much 
more  the  gospel  of  Luke  would  have  re- 
vealed of  the  soul  of  Christ  if  it  had  been 
written  by  one  who  understood  Jesus  with- 
out seeing  Him,  instead  of  one  who  did  not 
understand  Him  when  he  did ;  and  while 
the  cruelty  of  the  love  that  was  offered 
Christ  was  the  supreme  necessity  of  an 
honest  incarnation,  one  cannot  but  wonder 


Sba&ow  Cbrist  137 


whether  "  the  things  I  have  yet  to  say  unto 
you,  but  ye  cannot  bear  them  now,"  would 
not  have  been  spoken,  if  there  had  been  one 
great  heroic  soul  endowed  with  habits  and 
insights  that  would  comprehend  —  to  stand 
between  this  farewell  talk,  this  pitiful  re- 
serve of  Jesus  and  the  human  heart. 

But  the  sound  of  the  truth  shall  not  be 
lost.  It  matters  not.  With  the  tide  and 
the  sun  God  brings  it  back.  If  the  great 
listener  be  not  at  hand,  his  soul  shall  gather 
the  murmur  out  of  the  ages  as  the  shell 
gathers  the  sea.  Luther  takes  the  keys 
out  of  Peter's  hands  and  Isaiah  hears  the 
Beatitudes  in  his  grave, —  one  before  whose 
father-messiah  spirit  the  blundering  pea- 
sants who  walked  with  Jesus  shall  be  as  chil- 
dren forever,  before  whose  majestic  vision 
the  inspired  insight  of  the  great  apostle  to 
the  Gentiles  becomes  but  the  beautiful 
makeshift  of  the  day,  in  the  crisis  of  the 
kingdom  on  the  earth. 

Does  no  one  feel  the  dim  stirring,  the 
sense  of  what  it  would  have  been,  if  but 
one  of  Paul's  epistles  could  have  been  as- 


138  Cbe  Sba&ow  Cbrtet 


signed  to  Isaiah  —  if  he  who  wrote  the 
mighty  fore-word  had  left  but  one  gentle 
retrospect — if  he  who  spoke  the  sublimely 
unfulfilled  had  sung  the  fulfillment  itself? 
We  may  go,  it  is  true,  through  all  history 
with  our  wistful "  might  have  beens. "  All  is 
answered  and  answered  once  for  all,  by  the 
divine  was.  We  may  dare  to  reconstruct 
the  past,  because  it  is  safe  from  our  petty 
hands;  but  to  ask  what  Paul  would  have 
written  had  he  been  in  Isaiah's  place  ?  Con- 
jecture is  the  huge  shadow-measurement 
of  men.  Against  its  flickering  outlines  we 
may  lift  a  soul  and  trace  its  greatness  on 
the  lives  of  heroes  and  the  thoughts  of  God. 
Would  Paul  have  prophesied  the  Christ  — 
barely  convinced  by  the  Christ  Himself? 
Would  he  have  written  anything  at  all,  in 
that  hopelessness  which  was  Isaiah's  op- 
portunity ?  Paul  was  one  who  held  gar- 
ments while  Isaiahs  were  being  stoned. 
He  belonged  to  the  second  order  of  great 
men — those  who  see  afterward.  The  su- 
preme great  man  of  the  divine  visit  to  the 
earth,  wrapped  in  his  thousand  years,  side 


Cbe  Sba&ow  Cbrtst  139 


by  side  with  Peter,  who  knew  him  yester- 
day, Isaiah  walks.  Through  his  radiant 
New  Testament  soul,  past  the  metaphysics 
of  Paul  and  the  letters  of  John  the  hearts 
of  men  gaze  deep  to  know  what  their 
Messiah  was. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  a  God  de- 
scending to  live  with  men — Isaiah's  point 
of  view — the  emphasis  that  has  been  placed 
upon  the  cross,  the  more  glaring,  obvious 
cross,  must  have  been  the  hardest  part  of 
dying  on  it.  The  picturesqueness  —  the 
vulgar  appeal  of  the  subtlest,  divinest,  si- 
lentest,  most  ceaseless  sorrow  on  the  earth 
— the  cross  was  the  narrowing  down  of  the 
incarnation,  not  to  its  consummate  point, 
but  to  its  final  inexpressibleness.  It  was 
the  final  attempt  to  crowd  the  infinite  love 
which  had  been  manifested  more  in  the 
patience  and  divineness  of  every  day,  into 
the  tiny,  awful  word  that  men  call  Death 
—  the  shallow  side  of  suffering. 

Standing  in  the  awful  light  of  that  mo- 
ment when  Jesus  died  for  them — so  much 
more  awful  to  them  than  to  Him — so  much 


Cbc  SbaZ>ow  Cbrist 


more  awful  than  it  was  to  them  when  they 
died  themselves — the  simple  and  terrified 
hearts  of  the  Apostles  wrote  their  memories 
of  the  Christ.  They  could  not  but  be  mor- 
bid with  the  cross.  It  was  the  key-moment 
through  which  they  came  to  all  the  other 
moments,  and  through  its  immeasurable  re- 
buke they  wrote  the  life  and  interpreted 
the  days  that  had  passed.  But  Isaiah's  in- 
sight did  not  come  through  the  blinding 
misery  of  his  own  cowardice  and  the  for- 
saken death  of  God.  He  saw  Him  through 
the  stern  exigencies  of  his  own  prophetic 
life — the  greater,  more  sympathetic,  more 
kindred  way  of  seeing  Him — the  way  that 
men  who  see  before  instead  of  afterward 
must  always  see.  He  saw  what  He  had 
given  up.  He  saw  Him  coming  from  in- 
finite opportunity  to  crowd  a  god  into  a 
man  as  he  was  trying  to  crowd  a  prophet 
into  a  man.  He  knew  the  dread  necessi- 
ties He  had  taken  upon  his  soul  as  one  to 
whom  the  real  cross  would  be  not  dying 
before — would  be  coming  here  at  all — an 
insight  which  makes  the  fortieth  and  fifty- 


SbaDow  Cbrfst 


third  of  Isaiah  the  supreme  interpretation 
of  the  New  Testament,  though  a  solitary 
soul  was  singing  it  hundreds  of  years  away. 
To  play  at  being  men  like  the  gods  of 
the  Greeks,  to  play  at  being  gods  like  the 
poets  and  the  dreamers  of  the  earth,  were 
not  difficult;  but  to  be  in  grim  earnest,  with 
uttermost  faithfulness,  a  half-god,  with  a 
god's  ideals  and  a  man's  body  in  a  man's 
world;  to  be  a  half- man  with  a  god's  de- 
sires— Incarnation  is  the  eternal  essence 
of  sorrow — the  great  creative  sorrow  which 
has  been  the  dignity  and  the  destiny  of 
the  strong  from  the  beginning  of  the  world. 
From  the  Incarnation  downward,  which 
was  the  story  of  Christ,  to  the  Incarnation 
upward,  which  is  the  history  of  the  human 
race,  Savonarola  and  God  by  the  birth  in 
Bethlehem  are  brought  into  the  same  great 
tragedy — the  manhood  of  the  one,  "I  will 
be  God";  the  divinity  of  the  other,  "I 
will  be  a  man."  The  great  man's  concep- 
tion of  a  great  Messiah,  a  conception  which, 
approaching  the  divine  life  from  the  God's 
point  of  view,  makes  the  manger  in  the  inn 


fr, 


142  Gbe  SbaDow  Cbrist 

a  mightier  fact  than  the  Cross,  and  Christ- 
mas the  anniversary  of  the  greatest  sorrow 
in  the  world. 

By  a  natural  process  in  the  endeavor  to 
reach  the  feelings  of  the  coarsest  men,  we 
have  come  to  emphasize  the  very  release 
of  Jesus  as  His  crowning  sacrifice,  because 
it  took  a  form  which  the  very  brutes  of 
the  field  would  have  dimly  understood,  and 
had  the  impressiveness  of  the  fundamental 
awe  of  human  life  on  which  to  move.  The 
result  is  an  exaggerated,  lurid  cross,  loom- 
ing high  in  the  consciousness  of  men, 
because  it  is  nearest  to  them,  because  death 
is  the  nearest  word  to  terror,  the  shibbo- 
leth of  cowards,  of  those  who  have  lived 
not  yet  where  life  is  deep  enough  to  feel 
the  gentleness  of  a  grave,  or  know  the  way 
it  greets  a  hero,  or  folds  its  rest  about  the 
incarnation-ones  who  suffer  out  the  des- 
tinies of  men. 

The  prayer  in  the  later  days,  "Thy  will 
and  not  mine  be  done,"  shall  not  be  nar- 
rowed down  to  the  fear  of  suffering.  It 
shall  be  widened  out  into  the  hope  of  suf- 


ttbe  Sba&ow  Cbrlst  143 


fering  longer,  the  insistence  of  the  incar- 
nation, the  spirit  of  One  who  in  His  con- 
flict would  have  died  on  three  crosses  for 
three  more  years — of  love  and  tireless 
trust  and  infinite  expectancy — One  who 
knew  that  He  must  die  to  prove  to  the 
world  who  He  was,  but  who  could  not  be- 
lieve— not  yet,  not  quite  yet — "Oh,  my 
Father,  if  it  be  possible  let  this  cup  pass 
from  me!" — that  He  must  die  to  prove  to 
Peter  and  James  and  Philip  who  He  was. 
To  prove  ourselves  to  those  who  hate,  by 
dying — that  might  be — but  to  prove  our- 
selves to  those  who  love,  to  have  them 
side  by  side  wayfaring  with  us — dear  out- 
siders in  our  hearts — to  unfold  our  very 
souls  to  them — and  ask,  "Hast  thou  been 
so  long  time  with  me  and  dost  thou  not 
know  me?"  —  to  draw  their  faces  in  vain 
to  our  faces — to  know  that  they  will  come 
at  last,  that  they  will  look  down  into  the 
eternal  silence  there — that  they  will  love 
too  late.  This  is  Gethsemane  love.  To 
pass  on  with  an  incarnation  that  has  failed 
— to  serve  our  brothers  by  being  remem- 


144  £be  Sba&ow  Cbrist 

bered  instead  of  joining  our  hands  with 
their  hands  and  giving  them  our  very 
selves — to  give  up  the  privilege  of  dying 
every  day  and  die  once — this  was  the 
cross  of  One  who  hoped  to  the  last  to 
found  His  kingdom  upon  the  recognition 
of  men  instead  of  their  infinite  penitence. 
The  hero,  be  he  man  or  God,  chooses  the 
living  death.  He  will  live  in  sorrows  that 
make  the  grave  beautiful — a  paradise  of 
dust.  He  will  live  to  sorrow  out  service 
for  men  who  make  the  grave  terrible  only 
because  it  has  no  more  to  give,  because 
there  shall  be  no  reaching  out  there,  and 
no  cry  shall  be  heard  there,  and  we  are 
drawn  into  the  dumbness  of  the  earth. 

The  conception  which  for  hundreds  of 
years  in  the  Church — in  the  counting  off 
of  souls  and  the  worship  of  results — has 
made  the  fear  of  death  the  courage  for  con- 
version, finds  but  a  refinement  of  itself  in 
the  emphasis  of  the  cross — an  emphasis 
which,  while  it  is  perfectly  just  and  true 
and  Messianic  without  the  remotest  ques- 
tion, is  open  to  the  objection  that  it  is  not 


Cbe  Sbafcow  Gbtist  145 


Messianic  enough,  that  it  is  based  on  an 
essential  under-estimate  of  One  who  was 
crucified  first  with  the  love  that  was  borne 
Him,  then  with  the  hate — who  died  be- 
tween two  thieves — forever  the  symbols 
of  His  being  on  the  earth,  of  the  strange, 
sweet,  triumphant  fellowship  He  took  upon 
Himself — a  fellowship  which  above  and 
beyond  the  cross,  every  day  and  every 
hour  of  misunderstanding,  was  itself  the 
faithfulness,  the  realness,  the  bitter  literal- 
ness  of  the  incarnation — the  being  a  God 
— a  Comrade-God,  among  the  sons  of  men. 


XXIII 

Ube  Sbafcow  Cbrtet 

V 

THE  talking  of  Jesus  with  Moses  and  Elias 
is  the  secret  way  back  to  Isaiah's  prophecy 
for  the  modern  heart  —  the  parable  of 
Isaiah's  life. 

Born  with  the  instincts  of  greatness,  one 
of  the  kindred  of  heroic  vision,  Elias  was 
not  as  far  from  Jesus  as  the  way  Peter  and 
James  and  John  looked,  when  they  were 
told  what  the  Kingdom  really  was.  They 
stand  as  the  sorrowful  symbol  of  contem- 
porary faith  in  every  age,  toward  every 
prophet.  Wistful,  wondering,  struggling, 
ordinary  men,  day  after  day,  in  attracted 
dullness,  they  had  hung  upon  His  words. 
In  the  only  way  in  which  men  who  were 
arguing  who  should  be  greatest  could  call 
Him  out,  they  called  Him  out;  but  there 


cbe  SbaDow  Cbrtst  147 


came  a  time  when  there  was  nothing  for 
them  to  do  but  to  stand  apart  —  to  watch 
their  Master  talking  with  the  great. 

To  Peter  and  James  and  John  the  trans- 
figuration was  the  way  Jesus  had  never 
looked  for  them  —  the  shining  in  His  face 
when  great  hearts  loved  Him  back  —  the 
moment  of  His  being  understood. 

To  Jesus  it  was  the  moment  of  the 
mighty  listeners,  the  moment  when  the 
men  He  might  have  had  and  the  men  He 
had  to  have  faced  each  other  —  when  the 
heartache  of  the  difference  shot  its  pain 
through  the  shining  in  His  face. 

In  the  soul  of  the  Saviour  they  stood, 
these  two  groups  of  love.  Between  them 
a  Cross.  A  transfiguration  with  Peter  and 
James  and  John  shut  out,  an  absent-minded 
transfiguration,  could  not  have  come  to 
Him.  He  was  too  great  for  that.  He  could 
face  His  fact  and  His  faith  in  the  one  same 
calm,  beautiful  mood.  It  was  the  very  essence 
of  His  greatness  to  think  of  the  fishermen 
then.  The  one  moment  of  utter  brother- 
hood in  His  pitilessly  solitary  life,  with  the 


148  Cbe  Sbafcow  Gbrtet 


neighbors  of  His  spirit  by  His  side — He 
was  a  Saviour  because  it  was  but  a  moment. 
He  gave  the  password  of  the  great,  and 
then  walked  down  the  mountain  to  love 
ordinary  James  and  try  again  with  Judas 
and  be  Peter's  brother  until  He  died.  The 
more  beautiful  transfiguration  was  the  one 
on  the  way  down,  when,  listening  to  the 
prattle  of  His  apostles,  transfiguration  be- 
came incarnation.  "  Here  in  this  little 
Galilee,  here,  now,  with  this  self- same  Peter, 
with  this  poor,  pitiful  James — HERE,  NOW, 

I  WILL  BE  THE  SON  OF  GOD  !  " 

Out  of  the  struggle  between  his  trans- 
figuration love  and  his  love  of  men,  Isai- 
ah prophesied  an  incarnation  like  this  — 
mighty,  daily,  irrevocable,  immeasurable 

—  the  unceasing  crucifixion  of  the  Christ. 
The  incarnation  was  the  expectancy  of  God 

—  His  trusting  the  human  heart  even  be- 
yond a  cross, —  even  unto  living  with  it. 
It  was  only  an  expectant  Isaiah,  expectant 
enough  to  incarnate,  who  could  have  pro- 
phesied an  expectant  Messiah,  expectant 
enough  to  be  a  comrade  with  Judas  and 


TIbe  Sbafcow  Cbrfst  149 


Pilate  and  Mary  Magdalene.  Incarnation 
is  the  literalness  of  expectancy  —  the  very 
experiencing  of  it.  The  "  shall "  which  is 
but  the  room  the  prophet  invokes  from  the 
greatness  of  God,  out  of  centuries  and 
nations,  to  fulfil  himself,  was  but  Isaiah's 
indomitable  Now,  thrown  into  the  long 
lenses,  magnified  by  the  spirit,  stretched 
upon  the  years.  The  slide  of  one  intense 
experience  casts  the  outlines  and  colors  of 
his  soul  upon  the  largest  canvas  of  God. 
He  is  the  portrait  of  an  age — a  prophet. 
Peter  might  have  read  the  history  of  eigh- 
teen hundred  years  in  the  Saviour's  eyes, 
had  he  been  a  prophet,  and  Isaiah's  face 
was  the  shadowing  of  Christ's. 

In  the  human  stress,  the  agony  of  solitude, 
the  vow  of  his  own  creative  love,  Isaiah 
lifted  his  heart  to  the  ideal.  "  Not  by  be- 
ing great  thyself — not  by  needing  great 
men  around  thee  —  but  by  making  great 
men  out  of  those  thou  hast,  shalt  thou  be 
mine,"  saith  the  Lord.  "  In  mine  own  god- 
like handiwork  shalt  thou  come  to  me.  Men 
thou  shalt  bring,  wouldst  thou  be  a  man." 


Sbe  Sba&ow  Cbrfst 


This  was  the  Isaiah  spirit.  Striving  to 
connect  his  transfiguration,  struggling  to 
say  Now,  he  discovered  the  Man  of  Sor- 
rows and  acquainted  with  grief. 

Wrought  out  of  stolid  human  heart  by 
the  slowly  coming  Christ,  Isaiah  was  the 
first  great  miracle  of  His  spirit.  He  pro- 
phesied the  Messiah  He  had  tried  to  be. 
Lifted  into  the  shadow  of  the  mighty  love, 
he  was  the  Almost  Christ,  the  Christ  of 
the  Night 


"Not  having1  received  the  promises,  but 
having  seen  them  and  greeted  them  from 
afar." 

"Having  confessed  that  they  were  stran- 
gers and  pilgrims  on  the  earth,  that  they 
were  seeking  a  country  of  their  own" 


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